Istanbul, AMD's six-core native 45nm server chip is the biggest and the most complex chip that AMD and Globalfoundries have ever designed and manufactured.

Since many of our readers know that server cores and desktop cores derive from the same wafer, it is easy for us to explain that the image below of an Istanbul wafer also carries many die that will eventually be manufactured into Thuban six-core AMD desktop CPUs with 6MB L3 cache and support for DDR3-1333 memory.

The socket support is decided on in the packaging facility in Malaysia. As depicted in the picture, it is not possible to put many of these 346mm² chips on a single wafer. Ideally, it is best to have healthy yields with such big chips, especially when they are native.

Here is the wafer in all of its colorful beauty:



You can find a hi-res picture here.