AMD has been throwing the “Bulldozer” moniker around for some time now. Billed as the CPU that would get AMD back where it was in the Athlon days, Bulldozer was supposedly the “true revolutionary successor to the K8 architecture.”
The Phenom and Phenom 2 days are probably ones that AMD will want to forget for the most part, because although there were moments of greatness, in terms of sheer performance, Intel’s Dual Core, i7 and even i5 have dominated proceedings in recent years.
Well AMD wants to tell you that Bulldozer and Bobcat will be different. This is the first ground-up redesign since the K7 days. Bulldozer was originally supposed to be out in 2009, but is only finally preparing for launch now.
Bulldozer
This is the AMD CPU that gamers and PC enthusiasts will care about. It represents an innovative new approach to multi-threading, that supposedly balances dedicated and shared compute resources to provide a highly compact, high core count design that is easily replicated on a chip for performance scaling.
It is “an innovative design that delivers true core functionality by pairing two integer execution cores with components that can be shared as needed.” It’s quite difficult to understand if you are not CPU engineer, but AMD has explained the new process by way of the below diagrams.
It is also AMD’s first 32nm high-end CPU, which should mean improved power efficiency and performance.
Bobcat
AMD is also launching its new low-powered, notebook and netbook CPU architecture – Bobcat. Bobcat will go up against Intel’s Atom, and will be aiming for energy efficiency and capable performance potential. Bobcat is expected out late this year.
The first processor based on the new Bulldozer architecture will be Zambezi, and it will pack up to 8 cores. Early reports suggest it will run on AMD’s current AM3 platform, and it is due out in 2011.
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