AMD Trinity to Enter Mass Production in January 2012

Just a few days ago, an AMD official announced they are getting ready to introduce the first Trinity APUs in Q1 of 2012, and now a leaked company slide comes to reveal that the first Bulldozer-based accelerated processing units will enter mass production in January of 2012.

Judging by the document, AMD finalized engineering samples of these chips in early to late August, while the first production candidate samples are expected to come out in late October or early November.

These will be followed by a batch of production ready samples coming in December 2011 or January of 2012.

The production roadmap also reveals that together with the Trinity APUs, AMD is working on putting together a software stack, which should reach the 1.0 milestone at the same time as the first production ready samples.

According to the leaked slide, AMD will begin mass production of Trinity in January of 2012. The launch date of these next-generation APUs was not revealed, but it seems like AMD is pushing quite hard to release them at about the same time as Intel's Ivy Bridge.

AMD's next-generation APU combines either two or four processing cores based on the Bulldozer architecture with a VLIW4 GPU derived from the Cayman graphics used inside the Radeon HD 6900 series.

The computing cores will go by the odd name of Piledriver and, much like the current Llano APUs, lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU.

According to AMD, Piledriver based APUs will be divided into three main versions for specific price-points and markets.

All the chips will be manufactured by Globalfoundries using the 32nm fabrication process and early estimates indicate that the quad-core version of the chip will feature more than 2 billion transistors. (3DCenter Forums via Hardcore Hardware)

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