The colleagues over at xbitlabs report that upcoming Bulldozer processors have been taped out. AMD hopes to begin sampling of the chips with customers shortly and initiate mass production sometimes in 2011.

The architecture will be used in chips manufactured using the 32-nm process. The company scheduled a 16-core chip code-named Interlagos for release in 2011. Bulldozer is AMD's first properly new processor architecture since the Athlon 64 of 2003. Every AMD chip since then has been a variation on that theme. A tweak here, an added core or floating point unit there, perhaps. But basically the same design.

The "tape out" means that the artwork for the photomask of a circuit is sent to manufacturing.

Based on the information provided by AMD it will feature eight x86 processing engines with multithreading technology, two 128-bit FMAC floating point units, shared L2 cache, shared L3 cache as well as integrated memory controller. AMD also states that the new CPU will feature