Exclusive: Anyone curious about Trinity?

SemiAccurate has a cure for that craving

Jan 5, 2012 by

AMD Fusion LogoSo what do we know about Trinity? SemiAccurate knows that it looks like this.

Trinity die shot

Trinity in its glory

A few things stand out, and likely many more will be posted in the forums. First up, you can see cores, and there are two ‘Piledriver’ modules, not four ‘Stars’ cores. This should save a bit of space, but we haven’t fully looked at it pixel by pixel yet. In any case, that savings seems to have been taken up by more GPU, never a bad thing in our opinion.

There is a dual-channel DDR3 controller up top, and the same rough count of PCIe lanes on the bottom, along with a display controller. This part looks very different from the older Llano, more in arrangement than anything else, the lane count still adds up to the same number. The blocks themselves are different enough to suggest PCIe3 instead of PCIe2, but that could very well be an artifact of the arrangement or the die shot itself.

In the same rough spot near the DDR3 controller we have the North Bridge nestled between the cores, and the UVD and video encode blocks up in the top right. The shaders are as-yet unidentified origin, but don’t look to be Evergreen/VLIW5.

As has been rumored, the chip will come in three flavors, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. If anyone is still paying attention to this story after shiny pictures, the die size is within an hair of 240mm^2. Enjoy.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate