Posted on Thursday, May 24 2012 @ 20:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Last year AMD revealed that its Bulldozer processor has 1.2 billion transistors instead of 2 billion, and this week
Bright Side of News discovered that the transistor count of the Trinity APU also differs from the number that AMD originally supplied at launch; it's 1.3 billion and not 1.45 billion.
While writing our article about Trinity APU we took the transistor count originally supplied at its launch last year. That number was confirmed in the Llano post-mortem presentation at the Hot Chips 2011 conference, and widely cited in various Llano reviews, including the AnandTech one. Back then the quad-core version of Llano counted no less than 1.45B transistors. Now, if you look at Trinity launch articles at various sites, you will find a different number, such as 1.178B transistors on AnandTech. You will also find sites such as Tom's Hardware and Tech Report state Llano as 1.45 billion transistors, while Trinity packs 1.30 billion. What remains unchanged is the die size, which has remained at the same 228mm² since Llano emerged in 2011.
Sounds familiar? Remember Bulldozer x86 architecture and the Zambezi die of yesteryear? Back then the transistor count was wrongly reported to be a whopping 2 billion, only to have it corrected down to 1.2B later on (again AnandTech as an example). You can also derive with a little math that back then Llano was still officially 1.45B.
