Quote Originally Posted by JkS View Post
JF, I was wondering, since the Bulldozer architecture is modular, and previous slides have shown the next gen bulldozer to be upto 10cores.

Why do a 10 core, when it would make more sense to do a 12 core (in my eyes) so then a rectangle die can be cut out instead of an odd shape?

10 core I assume would be:
[x][x][x]
[x][x]

and a 12 core would be
[x][x][x]
[x][x][x]
Easy answer, because it will be sth like:
[x][x][x]
[x][x][y]

Where y = unknown.
Partly it will be used up by PCIe, maybe they add a directory cache, too, maybe something else ... but you can bet that they wont do anything unnecessarily ;-)