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Yeah, it is an MCM, and a big one - not as large as those multi-CPU POWER5 and POWER6 blocks, but still larger sized than what Intel had in the LGA775 & 771 sockets for the past few years. It has to provide space for two Istanbul dies, as well as some reserve area just in case the Bulldozer and beyond dies end up requiring a bit more girth.

So, is AMD architecturally doing a better job than Intel for these MCMs? Let's look at what we should be having here: The G34 substrate features two 45nm dies - each with six cores and private 512K L2 per core, sharing a - probably undersized - 6M L3 cache per die. I feel that AMD, having been on the forefront of dense cache memory cell technologies [anyone remember Z-RAM?], should have added a bit more here when they decided to jump from 4 to 6 cores...