Last week Hot Chips was held where engineers from different companies present and discuss architectures with other engineers and journalists. SemiAccurate was there and struck gold and found out the circuit size of Orochi with four modules that houses two cores each and is based on Bulldozer.
Bulldozer is AMD’s first architecture built from the ground and up since 1999, and during the summer we have had to deal with delays and possible launch dates several times over. What we know today is the die size of AMD’s coming processor architecture Bulldozer, where the circuit that is used here is code-named Orochi.
AMD’s Orochi measures 315 mm² with eight cores
Orochi measures 315 mm², which is a lot bigger than Llano at 228 mm² or Sandy Bridge 216 mm². Orochi has four modules with two cores each sharing the resources of the module, a total of 8 cores. Each module has 2 MB L2 cache, and the die as a whole has 8 MB L3 cache.
With all the talk about Bulldozer, Orochi may not feel that familiar, but we will mentioning three code names here. Bulldozer is the base architecture mentioned the most. Orochi is the name of the core that will be used and the picture above has eight processor cores, there will be a quad-core version that we don’t know the name of yet. Orochi is slated to appear in servers and in retail. Finally we have Zambezi that is the code name for Orochi in AM3+ packaging for retail.
Bulldozer is the future for AMD’s x86 processors, Trinity uses a Piledriver architecture that is based on Bulldozer
With this in hand all we can do is wait for the launch of Bulldozer, which is said to happen in September, but nothing is written in stone. AMD did say that Bulldozer will be shipping to partners in August, which according to SemiAccurates started last week.
