AMD 8-core Bulldozer FX Processors Have 800 Million Less Transistors Than Thought
It appears that AMD has made a minor goof when it comes to transistor count on their recently released AMD FX 8-core processors. We were told back in October that the processor has a die size of roughly 315mm2 with around two billion transistors. Nearly two months later the chip company has informed us that it really has 1.2 billion transistors. They were only off by 800 million transistors, which is actually pretty far off. We aren’t sure how this major error made it out the door without being caught by an engineer internally or even right after the reviews hit the web. This doesn’t make the PR team over at AMD look good, but they recently laid off most of them. At the end of the day this really means nothing as the processors that the review sites looked at and the chips that people are still the same. AMD just took a slap to the face though as they do not know how many transistors their processors have.
Last week, AMD confirmed the transistor count in the AMD FX CPU line-up at 1.2 billion, a correction from the earlier count of 2 billion. The earlier figure of 2 billion transistors was unfortunately shared in error. This correction is not the result of a new revision to the Bulldozer design. The correct count of 1.2 billion applies to all recently introduced 8-core AMD processors that are based on the new Bulldozer core AMD FX family of desktop CPUs and AMD Opteron family of server and HPC processors. We apologize for the confusion.
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