Friday, December 2nd 2011
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AMD Realizes That Bulldozer Has 800 Million LESS Transistors Than It Thought!
AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:
Source:
AnandTech
This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm².Yes, something as basic as how many transistors are in their flagship product wasn't known about until months after the launch! This kind of info would be common knowledge within the company by the time the first tape-out is ready during the design and testing phase, so surely this cannot be and there must be some other explanation? If this is an attempt to make the processor look better by showing it "doing more with less", then this PR stunt has backfired spectacularly and it would have been better to have left the "error" as it was. Paradoxically, FX processors are a sales success and are flying off the shelves as we just reported, here.
142 Comments on AMD Realizes That Bulldozer Has 800 Million LESS Transistors Than It Thought!
Insert Bill O'Reilly "you can't explain that" meme.
The point is transistor count isn't something you can base your purchases on. No CPU maker writes that down in the specs sheet. Not even Intel ARK shows transistor counts of Intel CPUs. Only electronics enthusiasts (those studying ICs, VLSI design, etc.,) would find transistor counts interesting.
"Performance per transistor" could be an interesting statistic though. The sudden drop in transistor count only goes on to improve that statistic.
right?
Doing the math they are right. But they knew all other cpus, except the most powerful one.
It was just selling out all the cpus and showing off as they got a bigger 2B cpu sitting in the bench.
EDIT: I did the math it shows 3.1 B lol
315x315 = 99225, 99225x0.000032 = 3.1752 LOL
maybe they were talking 1.2b for only 1 core xD
What would it be for 2B?
2Bx315mm2 = 630Bmm2
630Bmm2 / 1.2B = 525mm2
For 2B the die size would be 525mm2 so stop acting like it is fantastic thing.
This kind of architecture means only that we need lower nm tech
Oh maaaan!
double facepalm indeed , this whole bulldozer "Amd ex-employee" thing has to be one of the biggest lols in CPU history. definitely , it's all about the automation tools that AMD used to create, all those good "Athlon64" devs left the company long ago
All your transistors are belong to us!