AMD confirmed last week that the Llano yields at Globalfoundries was not good enough. It was forced to change its outlooks for Q3 this year. According to the motherboard manufacturers the availability is still poor, and will continue until Trinity launches.
Last week we reported that AMD’s yields for Llano was belo expectations. Due to the poor availability it had not sold as many chips as it had hoped, which resulted in disappointing figures for the fiscal report. Instead of 10% higher gross profit than Q2, it will be 4-6% and the final result will be revealed in the coming days when AMD has completed its quarterly fiscal report.
Digitimes reports that the poor availability of Llano will continue into 2012, and that the yields will not recover until Trinity launches. This comes from multiple motherboard manufacturers and OEMs that have not been supplied in the amounts they were asking to be able to meet the market demand.
Trinity that will replace Llano will lbring four Piledriver cores, Turbo Core 3.0, and a number of instruction sets that Llano’s Stars cores lacks. These include SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE5, AES, CLMUL, CVT16 XOP, FMA3, FMA4 and the renowned AVX that is an extension of SSE for doing 256-bit floating point operations.
AMD demonstrated Trinity ironically at Intel Developer Forum.
The graphics will be based on the same base architecture as Cayman, found in HD 6900, but also the coming HD 7000 series. AMD of course says its HD 7000 graphics inside, and the code name is London. Trinity will bring 50% higher 50% higher GFLOPS than Llano thanks to these optimizations.
Why Llano ran into problems is a bit hard to say. There are specualtions on the design rules for the GPU and CPU were too different, which makes it hard to calibrate the manufacturing process for Llano. This means a change for improving yields for the CPU portion affected the GPU portion negatively, and vice versa. These problems can not be directly correlated to Trinity, and we advice you to consider this information with a pinch of salt.
