AMD Downgrades Bulldozer Transistor Count By 800 Million 149
Robadob writes "It has come to light that AMD PR had originally reported that the new Bulldozer processor's transistor count was 2 billion. AMD PR are now asking reviewers to correct this count to 1.2 billion from the original amount they provided ~3 months ago."
LOL (Score:2)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this better? Doesn't this mean that the processor is smaller and more efficient?
Transistors are HUGE!!! You ever see a transistor radio?
I guess I just don't understand hardware. It just doesn't make sense to me. How can these fucking weird-ass CYLINDERS that are painted in stripes, plus weird flat "wires" on a green piece of whatever-the-fuck, actually do something? It makes NO SENSE.
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Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed.
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Not really - fewer transistors, sure, but the inefficiency where it matters (power usage, performance) is still worse than the previous generation, and well behind where Intel is. If anything, the fact that it is 1.2bn transistors instead of 2bn gives them even less of an excuse for the amount of power these things are sucking down while doing less work than the last generation.
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Whoosh!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Great sig, MasterNerd.
noob (Score:1, Funny)
NO, you stupid AMD, don't do that...
No problem (Score:1)
It was a rounding error (Score:5, Funny)
The FPU in these chips rounds 1.2 billion up to 2.0 billion.
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Haha, according to a rumor I just made up, someone from the PR Department was using an old pentium lying around with the FDIV bug. It rounds of 2 billions for very large quantities of 1 billion :p
Re:It was a rounding error (Score:5, Funny)
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Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
Getting hazy, can't divide three by two
My answers I cannot see 'em
They're stuck in my Pentium
It would be sweet
My answers fleet
On a workable FPU.
(Credit to some anonymous TI employees)
Serious policy changes here ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally the route of a true american corporate cultured corporation would be to deny everything and fool everyone and rip as much cash as it can. Until they were confronted at courts.
But now, amd marketing is rather needlessly contacting reviewers to make corrections, while taking a hit in p.r.
But is it really a hit ? Coupled with the fact that the new ceo kicked a lot of marketing staff, this tells me that the new term in amd is going to be a term reminiscent of early 90s in technology - a responsible era in which corporations have actually manufactured useful gadgets and sold them honestly, trying to get the edge on each other through tech - not with filthy dealings or deceit (hello intel and the bribery verdict)
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If AMD kicked out their PR department and replaced them with your semi-coherent fanboy rants, then I'd say they made a mistake. Fortunately, it looks like you don't get paid to do marketing for AMD... and from the looks of the knock-off PHP plugins that you likely plagiarized from open-source projects and then re-sell, you aren't making money from practically anywhere else either.
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So in other words you don't have any issue with the SUBSTANCE of what he says, that you feel it worthwhile to bring up.
Re:Serious policy changes here ? (Score:5, Insightful)
what about examples from outside the USA? BP stands for British Petroleum, don't you know?
some of the food scares going on in China are just scary - melamine in milk, cooking oil salvaged and re-refined from retail liquid waste... of course, people got the death penalty for the milk thing.
Re:Serious policy changes here ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Er, well, actually, BP doesn't stand for British Petroleum any more. It officially stands only for BP. In fact, they have tried to make people think BP stands for Beyond Petroleum. OK, this sounds like an academic point, but actually it illustrates the very practical point that all these corps from whatever country are international and indistinguishable nowadays.
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No, BP still stands for British Petroleum regardless of what their corporate HQ wants to call themselves.
And gambling is not equivalent to gaming.
And thermal is not equivalent to fossil fuel burning.
And KFC is really Kentucky fried chicken.
And marketing is really just plain old fashioned advertising.
etc. etc.
don't buy into the crap just because someone with an agenda and a bad reputation would like to change what you think.
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Er, well, actually, BP doesn't stand for British Petroleum any more. It officially stands only for BP.
pssst Belgian Petroleum
They just lost my business! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm paying for *transistor count*, not GFLOPS!!!
Priorities, people!
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With Bulldozer, you're not going to be happy either way.
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As long as it has built in AES instructions and can give me a low TDP, Im happy.
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Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the true relevance of transistor count? If I see two processors with identical performance and power efficiency but radically different transistor counts do I have any real world incentive to select one over the other? I mean, presumably the one with fewer transistors in roughly the same die space might overclock better, might have a longer MTBF, etc., but beyond that should I care?
Or did timothy post this just to keep up the fanboi flame wars?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The PR numbers provided for tech journalist previews and fan-wank benchmarks are pretty much just noise: If the number is big, you'll see a couple of sentences about "zOMG 2 Billion! motherfucker is a BEAST!". If the number is small, you'll see a couple of lines about how 'the foocorp design team was heavily focused on optimization for this generation'. The only thing the end customer will care about are the benchmarks at the end.
For people attempting to glean financially useful clues about a company's process strength or design prowess, or ability to hit some thermal target in the upcoming product cycle, transistor counts are likely much more relevant; but are also rather less likely to depend on PR numbers(actually reverse engineering a modern x86 chip would be Serious Business; but just paying somebody to crack the top off, get some die shots, and provide good ballpark numbers on transistor numbers and allocation between cache and various functional blocks should be relatively cheap compared to some of the moves you might make on the basis of such information...)
It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong, since the fanboys and the haters basically make no real use of the number and the people who really care should be able to easily detect a lie of that magnitude; but I'd be somewhat surprised if the original PR numbers meant all that much.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Not really.
Marketeer: How many transistors in the new chip?
Engineer: We're up over a billion now.
Marketeer: Ok, thanks. 2 billion.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
It's like broadband, you get "up to" 2 billion transistors, or more precisely any number of transistors between 0 and 2,000,000,000.
I offered to pay them "up to 2 billion Euros" for one but they declined.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it means nearly nothing to anybody. The closest one I've seen is another answer to this thread linking it to cache sizes, but even then, people measure caches on bytes, not transistors.
Buyers want software performance, measured by benchmarks, cache size + instruction throughput, or any other functional metric. Engineers care more about hight level units, except where they optimize deeper, fabs care about die area. Nobody cares about how many times a poly line crosses over a crystaline line.
By the way, that is probably the reason such a huge mistake in the number could be made. Nobody cared.
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Transistor count means a lot to the future evolution of the product. If it's lower than the competitor, then that means that (on the same process technology) you can fit more onto a wafer and so they'll be cheaper. A low count means that you can easily fit extra cores on a die. The transistor count also implies the transistor count per core, so a lower number means that adding a couple of extra cores is less expensive that previously thought so it's likely to happen sooner. It may also mean that they're
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems bafflingly weird that PR would provide a number so grossly wrong, since the fanboys and the haters basically make no real use of the number and the people who really care should be able to easily detect a lie of that magnitude; but I'd be somewhat surprised if the original PR numbers meant all that much.
IANALE (I am not a layout engineer), but it's my understanding that it is not an easy task to actually figure out how many transistors are contained within a modern chip. The CAD tools used aren't anything like Photoshop, where you can pop up an info window and see how many pixels it has. There are many different pieces within a chip - some might be standard library cells (like building a chip out of legos, rather than making a custom injection mold and filling it with plastic - where each building block is a few to a few thousand transistors (or more?). Other parts might be a full-custom layout, where somebody hand-placed every transistor to get the highest speed, lowest power, smallest area, or some combination of all of those. The chip might also include some hard macros, IP that is purchased from another company (like a memory controller or power manager) and just plopped onto the chip, with no insight to what is actually inside. There are hierarchies, and some parts (like cores or cache sub-blocks) are replicated a couple times, or a couple thousand times.
So it's my indication that any time you hear one of these numbers, it's really just an estimate anyway. Probably some engineer at AMD heard the 2B number after PR trumpeted it, thought it sounded a little high, and found a mistake in somebody's estimate.
Or, maybe more likely, marketing just made crap up without actually asking any of the engineers. That happens a lot too, and it pisses us engineers off to no end. At least when they do it after the product is made, PR has to fess up. When they do it before a product is finalized, it usually means engineering has to scramble and actually make it do whatever marketing promised.
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I wonder if they count non-functional ones too? A typical mid-range graphics chip is the same as a high end one except that some of the parts failed factory tests and were disabled. There are 1000 stream processors on the silicone, but only 800 of them actually work.
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Theyre talking about a platform, so presumably all the transistors counted are functional in SOME iteration of the Bulldozer line.
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IANALE (I am not a layout engineer), but it's my understanding that it is not an easy task to actually figure out how many transistors are contained within a modern chip.
I find this beyond difficult to believe due to the way computer chips are designed today, which is to say, entirely on the computer. You can figure out how many gates there are from the netlist [cs.tut.fi].
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IANALE either, but I'm willing to believe it. Even if you have the netlist, the entities in the netlist are logic gates, or composite logic elements. Unless you go through the standard cell library and count gates, you don't know exactly how many transistors there are per entity. I'm also willing to believe that standard cells don't come with transistor counts, because at the chip level you're laying out rectangles of diffusion/metal/polysilicon and nobody cares about the exact number of transistors; plus t
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First of all, they've got a figure now, did they just invent this one too? Secondly, the netlist is programmatic, it should be trivial to compute the number of actual transistors (transistor having a definition and all) with software. If someone can explain why you can't simply figure out when these rectangles overlap and whether there's three layers of alternating potential overlaid then I'll be impressed.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
IANALE (I am not a layout engineer), but it's my understanding that it is not an easy task to actually figure out how many transistors are contained within a modern chip. The CAD tools used aren't anything like Photoshop, where you can pop up an info window and see how many pixels it has.
Actually, it is really easy to figure out how many transistors there are. Generally, you run both LVS (logic vs schematic) and DRC (design rule checking) tools on the final layout data base. These tools look at all the transistors in the layout data base and compares them to the original design (LVS) and to make sure that the active areas of the transistors are spaced out accordingly to make sure they can be fabricated into masks that yield (the base rules are provided by the silicon foundary often augmented by the library provider). After you run these tools, AFAIK it just tells you how many transistors it checked. You might tell the tool to skip some parts of the design (say like rams) in the final netlist, but generally the parts you skip have been run through the tools before hand or in parallel.
Of course running these tools takes a long time, and sometimes they are not finished running before the chip is fabricated for the first time. Sometimes, you send off the design or tape it out, and then you kick off running these tools so the chip starts to go to the mask-maker whist you are still running the LVS/DRC tools, but generally you know the results of LVS/DRC before you go into production (or your company probably isn't meeting your ISO 900x certification requirements). If nothing else, the fab will make you sign a yield waver if you don't run DRC (basically, they won't guarantee any working parts).
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Transistor count is closely tied to cache size. This CPU just went from "Extreme Edition" to "Celeron" to use Intel terminology.
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Transistor count is closely tied to cache size. This CPU just went from "Extreme Edition" to "Celeron" to use Intel terminology.
Alright, but doesn't that response just transform my question about transistor count in the whole processor into exactly the same question about transistor count in the SRAM? If the cache size and performance of the whole unit are reported accurately, should real people care how many transistors there are?
Is there some kickass use case for a chip with a SuperPi score of X, a SPEC score of Y, a 6MB cache, 8 threads, 2.9 GHZ clock, and 2 billion transistors that totally falls apart on a processor with the
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Space heater?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or maybe 2billion is what the thing actually has, but in order to get it to work they had to abandon a significant portion even if they still exist on the chip.
It wouldn't be the first time unused banks of memory were left on chip but simply abandoned.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe 2B is what Bulldozer actually has, but their new PR team came up with the idea: claim it only has 1.2B transistors, so even though it still sucks, at least it doesn't need 2 billion transistors to do it.
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Of course, ideally that would be true. But when it turned out not to be the case, damage control mode kicked in and they now try to claim that at least it sucks efficiently.
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eH? Two BILLION? That's a whale of a processor.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
PR department playing telephone
First person: "We have 1.2 billion transistors"
Next person: "Wow, that's about 1 and a quarter billion transistors!"
Next person: "Wait, 1 and quarter billion transistors? That's almost 1.5 billion!"
Next person: "Holy shit, 1.5 billion transistors? That's nearly 2 billion!"
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That's probably not too far from the truth. Someone in marketing probably thought transistor count was a statistic you could fudge, like contrast ration (10,000,000,000:1 contrast ration display! wowie! .... from grey to dark grey). Once a number is checked out by the guy in charge of things (probably new due to the recent PR flush) it gets passed around as a word doc or pdf of bullet talking points or specs and printed on fancy glossy paper by people who don't understand computers much beyond photoshop and
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You as a customer, no. For the people interested in the technology or in trying to get any market insight out of it, yes. For example, customers doesn't care if something is on 45nm or 32nm but we know it has a huge impact on chips/wafer and so cost. I'd speculate but since you want the customer view, move along these are not the news you are looking for.
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The number of transistors is roughly proportional to both the performance of the machine and its power usage. Of course 0.8b could be electrically disabled (fuses or whatever) and they would act as if they weren't there, but then they would be taking die space for no reason, which would still impact the price.
In comparison, a 4-core Sandy Bridge has 1.16b transistors, which means it still has enough transistors that a proper design should be comparable in performance at the same clock rate, so any actual di
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the true relevance of transistor count? If I see two processors with identical performance and power efficiency but radically different transistor counts do I have any real world incentive to select one over the other? I mean, presumably the one with fewer transistors in roughly the same die space might overclock better, might have a longer MTBF, etc., but beyond that should I care?
If you can find one processor with 2 billion transistors, and another with 1.2 billion, and they both draw exactly the same power requirements, performance, instruction set, and have the same heat envelope, then either somebody in marketing is lying, or somebody is doing something horribly wrong. On the one hand, it should not take 2 billion transistors to do something that can be done with 2/3 of that, but on the other hand, if you have 1/3 fewer transistors, you should experience an according decrease in heat leakage.
That being said, numbers like transistor count matter to enthusiasts. These are the same people who used to spend $1000 to buy the 3.8GHz P4 chip instead of the $300 3.4GHz chip. For some folks on the market, bigger == better, and there's no point in trying to explain to them that they can accomplish the same job with a less powerful chip. Some people build/buy/upgrade computers so that they can brag about being more powerful than their buddies, and when you couple that mentality with a disposable income, well, you know the rest.
For somebody like me, it's not likely to make a big difference. But I'm typing this on a laptop that's powered by a Celeron U3600 ULV chip... a dual core 1.2GHz processor that's designed for low power consumption, not high performance. It's been a long time since I have built/bought a high performance system, and I'm unlikely to get back into that game for a while: I gave up on computer gaming years ago. The one thing in this announcement that may give me pause next time I build a system is that a revision from 2 billion to 1.2 billion transistors probably means some kind of manufacturing problem that they thought they could overcome, but are now not thinking they can. Even if that's not the case, AMD is going to have egg on their face a while over this one.
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Of course it shouldn't matter to customers how many transistors a chip has. It should only matter what it can do and how much power it needs to do it. However, I think more transistors generally means more power dissipation, so AMD may be trying to allay fears that the chip will be a power hog.
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Slightly smaller disaster (Score:5, Informative)
I guess the new figures make a little more sense. Bulldozer's performance was fairly similar to their previous (and smaller) Thuban Core, at 904 million transistors -- it was as if AMD decided to take more than half of their transistor design budget, heap it in a corner, and set it on fire.
Go count it yourself (Score:1)
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"1,069,234,873"
"1,069,234,874"
"1,069,234,875"
"Coffee ?"
"Yes please"
"2 sugars ?"
"yes , thanks"
"1,069,...... "
"1,062........."
"1"
"2"
"3"
"4......."
Not helping their cause much.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So a few points about this rather bizarre announcement:
1. Unfortunately for AMD this does nothing to reduce the power consumption of Bulldozer which is higher than a 3960x at stock speeds. When you remember that over 1/3 of the transistors on the CPU (using the new 1.2 Billion transistor count) are in the L3 cache that only runs at 2.2 Ghz while the L3 on the 3960x runs at full-speed, you have to wonder at whether GloFo's 32 nm process has some fundamental flaws, or if AMD didn't listen to GloFo's design rules (or some of both).
2. AMD's and GloFo's combined marketing of their "gate-first" 32 nm process bragged loudly and repeatedly that gate-first (as opposed to gate-last used by Intel) gave 20%+ transistor density benefits and that Intel's process wasn't truly 32 nm. Well, when Bulldozer was reported to have a die area of 315 mm^2 and a 2 billion transistor count, this seemed like a justified advantage. Now, however, the transistor density of Bulldozer is lower than any other 32nm design from either AMD or Intel. Note: the same AMD PR guys that adjusted the transistor count confirmed that the 315 mm^2 die size is still accurate.
Rory Read is smart to shift the focus away from these unmanufacturable monsters and to put it on the next-generation of Bobcat and Trinity designs where AMD can actually leverage it's only real advantage over Intel: the GPU.
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aka version 1.0 of the new design leaves much room for refinement but they couldn't wait any longer to ship it. News at 11.
well, theres only one thing for it. (Score:3)
Class action lawsuit please (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Class action lawsuit please (Score:5, Funny)
If you bought a V10 car and it turned out to have a 4 cylinder, you'd be upset. No?
Yeah, if it turned out it couldn't climb hills and had a 0 - 60 time of 17.1 seconds. If it performed like I wanted and happened to have only 4 cylinders I wouldn't care. Unless one of my primary 'needs' was for everyone to know I had a big-ass 'engine', if you know what I mean.
Put more directly, benchmarks and statistics are just dick measuring without some context.
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Have you ever bought a digital camera?
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As long as it enables time travel and mows lawns i don't care wtf it is.
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If the horsepower and torque figures are still accurate, who cares? Heck, it might even be better. Compare the novelty of having a 500 HP V10 vs a 500 HP 4 cylinder.
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Chances are that 500HP V10 will last a lot longer than a 500HP I4/H4. Boosting something to hell and back tends to have a negative effect on reliability.
That only makes sense if you assume the cylinders are all the same size. It would be more logical to assume the cylinders in the 4 cylinder engine have a much greater displacement. Aviation engines often have much larger cylinders than automotive ones.
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That only makes sense if you assume the cylinders are all the same size. It would be more logical to assume the cylinders in the 4 cylinder engine have a much greater displacement.
Spoken like someone who knows fuck-all about engines. You don't make engines with pistons that big because you can't make them tight and light. The trend has been towards ever-smaller pistons, with 4 liter V8s and such.
Re:Class action lawsuit please (Score:5, Insightful)
They told you the V10 engine used 50 hours of labour in its manufacture but it turned out the V10 engine only used 25 hours of labour in its manufacture.
It's still the same engine in every way. Transistor count is simply a manufacturing detail.
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Not if it has 1000Nm of torque while making a nice noise ...
There's a new update (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD just clarified that Bulldozer does have 2 billion transistors after all, but only 1.2 billion work. Which explains something about its performance.
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and the other 800,000,000 are looking for employment elsewhere ?
Re:There's a new update (Score:5, Funny)
and the other 800,000,000 are looking for employment elsewhere ?
No, they're just Occupying space.
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AMD just clarified that Bulldozer does have 2 billion transistors after all, but only 1.2 billion work.
Link please?
Cache? (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall seeing that the top Bulldozer only had 8MB L3 cache, which seemed a bit low - Intel's equivalent top-of-the-line desktop models reach 15MB, and the server models 30MB.
At first, I just figured they were targeting the middle price bracket, but then they priced against the high-end. So I would not be surprised if much of the missing (or disabled, if that rumor turns out to be true) transistors belong to the cache.
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I recall seeing that the top Bulldozer only had 8MB L3 cache, which seemed a bit low - Intel's equivalent top-of-the-line desktop models reach 15MB, and the server models 30MB.
How long until we can run Windows Server 2000 completely on Cache-disk? Can you imagine the performance?
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What I just lost how many transistors ? (Score:1)
Transitors Server vs Desktop (Score:2)
The 16core server parts were listed as having 2.4billion transistors at launch so either the FX PR was wrong/confused and it really is 1.2Billion transistors as it they say it is now for an 8Core FX or AMD manged to bolts on an entire second 8core processor to the server parts with 400million more transistors.
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IIRC, it is the latter and the "Interlagos" 16core server parts actually contain the quivalent of two 8core FX parts. So I guess the PR was wrong/confused. Not really surprising, AMD marketing is often confused ;-)
What's a transistor? (Score:4, Informative)
Anybody that has ever looked at the schematic for a VLSI chip at the schematic level will have problems figuring out what the transistors are for because so many of them are actually being used as resistors, diodes, or capacitors. Many are bias regulators or interstage coupling voltage level translators. Transistors are the simplest things to put on an IC so there tends to be lots of them. The transistor count rarely translates into a true level of complexity for the device over all. Having said that the last time a transistor count on a microprocessor meant anything was with Motorola's first two major processors. The MC6800 actually had about 6,800 transistors. The MC68000 had about ... wait for it .... 68,000 of them!
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MC6800 had about 4000 transistors. (5000 for MC6800D). The name of M6800 system is unrelated to the transistor count.
68000 had indeed close to 68k transistors (~70k), so its name could be influenced by both 6800 and the transistor count.
Marketing's Excel spreadsheet (Score:2)
Good stuff: =ceiling(A1)
Bad stuff: =floor(B1)
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Did anyone stop to wonder how many square mm 2 BILLION transistors would take up?
Well, that rather depends on how big they are.
It's MILLION, folks.
Yes, as in a thousand MILLION.
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I have to know... Are you joking, did you just wake up from a very long coma, or are you just deeply miseducated on the subject? I honestly can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
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Successful troll was successful.
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You're looking at it the wrong way. First, take a look at the size of your real CPU with 2 million transistors. Now imagine a square made up of 31.6 x 31.6 of those chips to equal 1000 times as many transistors. Think you could fit those all on the motherboard? Think you could get carry the heat away? Think your power mains could supply that kind of power?
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Look. You need to check your facts before you appear even more stupid than you already look. The 486 processors from Intel had more than 1 million transistors when introduced in 1989. Do you REALLY think we've only increased the transistor count by 20% in 22 years? Moore's law would suggest that the number of transistors should increase by a factor of 2^22 ~ 4 million during this time, giving us 4 billion transistors. We seem a little short of this, but processors have definitely reached the 1 billion mark.
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Actually that's our job - as the HW geeks keep making things faster, we have to work hard to use up all those extra cycles! I remember the days when we could fill all of RAM (actually core) with a single subroutine! Now we have to make all these wisy things, useless services, and general useless cycle-burners to try to keep up. It used to be that we could just toss in an extra FOR I=1,1000; NEXT I and use up a second or two. Now we have to load up the I/O with hundreds of packets in a dozen different ph