Cache/RAM always looks like basically solid colors because it’s so densely packed with a repeating structure.
How would you know it’s not the green stuff? I don’t know, perhaps by size. I would imagine the green stuff is some other kind of cache or memory (op cache? TLB buffers? patchy SRAM).
This is what I know from seeing these shots online for years. I’m no expert by any means.
The green stuff might have been the VMX register files - those things were pretty huge (128 registers per thread, each register 16 bytes, so 212816=4 KiB per core). While the L1 cache was higher capacity (32 KiB) as a general rule of thumb faster memory uses more die area per bit.
But I seem to remember being told that the green areas were the VMX pipelines. I don't remember clearly, and the hardware people I asked at the time were uncertain - they were too far removed from that aspect of the hardware.
The other reason to assume that the blue is the caches is because it is closer to the cross-bar and the cross-bar is what connects the cores to the L2. Incoming data from the L2 goes first to the L1 caches so they would logically be on that side.
How would you know it’s not the green stuff? I don’t know, perhaps by size. I would imagine the green stuff is some other kind of cache or memory (op cache? TLB buffers? patchy SRAM).
This is what I know from seeing these shots online for years. I’m no expert by any means.