Hey Look, AMD's Shipping Bulldozer! (Sort Of)

Posted 09/08/2011 at 4:08am | by Paul Lilly

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Picture us on the other end of your monitor waving a hand in front of your face as we say, "These are not the Bulldozer chips you're looking for." And we mean it. What you're waiting for is codenamed Zambezi, AMD's upcoming FX-series desktop processors rumored to ship in October. Nevertheless, AMD just announced it's begun revenue shipments of its first Bulldozer processors, only these are codenamed Interlagos. Know the difference?

For starters, these are the world's first 16-core x86 processors with two 8-core dies squeezed into a single package. These are server-based chips compatible with existing AMD Opteron 6100 Series platforms, which means they won't end up in your desktop (that's what Zambezi is for). AMD says it's been producing Interlagos chips since August, and the fact that they're now shipping is a good sign for Bulldozer in general, even if you can't stick one of the CPUs into your desktop tower.

"This is a monumental moment for the industry as this first 'Bulldozer' core represents the beginning of unprecedented performance scaling for x86 CPUs," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. "The flexible new ‘Bulldozer’ architecture will give Web and datacenter customers the scalability they need to handle emerging cloud and virtualization workloads."

So there you have it: Bulldozer is officially here, only it really isn't, but it will be. Make sense? The big takeaway from this is that Bulldozer, on the desktop, is close. Very close.

Image Credit: AMD