AMD Details Upcoming Bulldozer Architecture

Vigile writes "AMD is taking the lid off quite a bit of information on its upcoming CPU architecture known as Bulldozer that is the first complete redesign over current processors. AMD's lineup has been relatively stagnant while Intel continued to innovate with Nehalem and Sandy Bridge (due late this year) and the Bulldozer refresh is badly needed to keep in step. The integrated north bridge, on-die memory controller and large shared L3 cache remain key components from the Athlon/Phenom generation to Bulldozer but AMD is adding features like dual-thread support per core (but with a unique implementation utilizing separate execution units for each thread), support for 256-bit SIMD operations (for upcoming AVX support) all running on GlobalFoundries 32nm SOI process technology."

Comments

AMD's stagnant?

[iamhassi]

"AMD's lineup has been relatively stagnant while Intel continued to innovate with Nehalem and Sandy Bridge (due late this year) and the Bulldozer refresh is badly needed to keep in step."

AMD just came out with Six-Core processors for $200, how is that stagnant? Intel's only 6-core processor is still $1000

Re:AMD's stagnant?

[MBGMorden]

There's an infinite capacity to use floating point arithmatic too, but we abandoned the separate chip for it idea long ago. FPU's these days are still getting faster with each chip - no limit on processing power was hit. We simply got to a point where a completely capable FPU could be bundled in with the CPU and it's performance was sufficient for most users.

Imagine this scenario: the integrated solutions don't suck. Instead of being virtually useless for 3D graphics, they have performance about equal to the mid-line $150 to $200-ish cards of today (and let that scale for whatever cards meet that definition of the time). You can get better performance, but it's going to take huge full-length cards running SLI or the like, and it's going to take several hundred dollars to beat your standard integrated solution.

My wager is that 95% of the people who currently buy discrete chips would accept integrated at that point. The chips would still get faster over time, and there still might be a few extreme solutions available, but the average user wouldn't need them anymore. My guess is we'll get there quite soon. And if you're asking why the chip companies would want to sell us 1 chip where they previously sold 2? Simple answer: market competition. If AMD can push out a chip as fast or faster than Intels that also has an integrated GPU that rivals discrete solutions, then they'll take a lot of business from Intel. That's all the motive they need.

Re:Bulldozer?

[sideslash]

I think people's mental impression will vary; yours is typical of an office worker. To someone employed in construction or agriculture, a bulldozer is a symbol of getting huge amounts of work done in a very short time. This reminds me of an ad I saw some years back for an "object oriented database", where they showed a photoshopped race car with a tractor on the back end. Their marketing message was "Why do you have a sluggish RDMS on your web app's back end?" I found it hilarious, because my reflexive response was to ask, "Why is that totally useless racecar pasted on the front of that excellent looking tractor, the kind of vehicle that is used to grow all the crops that feed the world?" :)