AMD's Next-Gen Steamroller CPU Could Deliver Where Bulldozer Fell Short

MojoKid writes "Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off the company's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of AMD's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part for AMD. Bulldozer, which launched just over a year ago, was a disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, offered a number of key changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built Bulldozer in the first place. Enhancements to Fetch and Decode architecture have been made, as well as increased scheduler efficiency and cache load latency, which combined could bring a claimed 15 percent performance-per-watt performance gain. AMD expects to ship Steamroller sometime in 2013 but wouldn't offer timing detail beyond that."

Comments

AMD has cool code names.

[Anonymous Coward]

They all sound like sexual positions.

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[dbIII]

In some races they are just about alone on the track. An AMD based server with 64 cores and 128GB of memory will set you back $9000. with Intel you can now get 80 cores for about ten times that, or 40 cores for about five times that.
For some tasks when you can get 640 slightly slower cores (the ten core Intel chips have a lower clock than the ones with less cores) for the same price as 80 it's pretty easy to see which way to go. If anything is massively parallel you can forget about Intel at this point.

Re:AMD has cool code names.

[gweihir]

Indeed. I think AMD is actually far ahead of Intel (again, think e.g. integrated memory controller, for quite a few server-loads Intel was vastly behind for a time due to that). The speed increases of CPUs have become slower and slower and mater less and less. The trick for AMD will be to survive intact until Intel gives up and gets a next-gen architecture of their own. By then AMD will have ironed out the kinks and they will be on an equal footing again. When looking at their relative sizes and cash-reserves, it is impressive that AMD can compete at all. But the bottom-line is that in almost all cases (exception: You need a small number of CPUs with high power because your software is stupid, and cost of the CPUs is not an issue) you get significantly better value for the money from AMD.