Apr 7, 2011 10:11 GMT  ·  By

The very first pictures depicting a processor based on the highly anticipated Bulldozer architecture have made their way to the Web, to reveal some more details about AMD's upcoming CPU lineup. The chip is marketed as an engineering sample and was built by AMD in 2010.

No other information except for the two pictures were provided, but the product code of the chip doesn't seem to resemble any AMD processor that is available right now.

Sadly, most of the OPN is masked so we can't find out the chips TDP or any other details, but we do know this is a desktop CPU, probably one of the FX-series models which AMD is expected to launch at the beginning of June.

Moving to the backside of the chip, we find that it uses a different pin arrangement than that of today's AM3 chips, which seems to contradict Asus' and MSI's claims regarding AM3 motherboard compatibility with AM3+ processors.

A possible explanation for this fact could be that the engineering sample pictured is based on an older revision of the Zambezi core which wasn't actually compatible with AM3 motherboards and that somewhere down the line AMD has decided to remove those two extra pins.

AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors will be split into three different product families depending on the systems they target.

The Zamabezi core will be used for desktop processors, Valencia for entry-level and mid-range servers, and Interlagos will be used in HPC systems.

However, all will share the same architecture that features a modular design approach, each module being comprised of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each and as much as 2048KB of L2 cache.

The first Bulldozer processors are expected on June 11 (some sources even say June 7) and will use the Zambezi desktop die. (via Donanim Haber)

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AMD Bulldozer CPU engineering sample
AMD Bulldozer CPU engineering sample - Backside
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