AMD’s Official Stand on Trinity and Llano Transistor Count

There was quite a mystery last week concerning the transistor count of AMD’s latest APU and about the previous generation, the well-known Llano APUs.

AMD has finally come clean about the whole thing and confessed they don’t really like to count billions of transistors and decided to ignore a couple of hundred of millions. AMD’s Peter Amos has graciously provided a response to BSN’s inquiry and that was: "Beginning in 2012, AMD updated its methodology for transistor counts to ensure consistency. The numbers provided for our recent Trinity launch (and all disclosures moving forward) are based on a flat device count minus de-capacitor cells. The numbers that were provided at last year’s Hot Chips conference were based on flat device + de-cap cells."

This practically explains why AMD’s “Bulldozer” got rid of about 800 million transistors and why Llano was considered to have a transistor count anywhere between 1.17 billion to 1.45 billion. Practically, both counts were correct, but it’s just that AMD decided to ignore the de-capacitor cells. Therefore, counting by the new method, Llano is made of 1.17 billion transistors and 280 million de-cap cells.

Posted in: Hardware, News, Preview