AMD has offered journalists a detailed glimpse of its next-gen “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat” processor cores at the Hot Chips 2010 conference in Silicon Valley.
“The new [cores], codenamed ‘Bulldozer’ for high-performance PC and server markets, and ‘Bobcat’ for low-power notebook and small form-factor desktop markets, were designed from the ground-up to address specific requirements and compute workloads,” explained senior AMD VP Chekib Akrout.
“These cores are central to AMD’s future roadmap, including the Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), [our] new high-performance server and client CPUs.”
According to Akrout, Bulldozer and Bobcat are two of the “most important” achievements in the company’s history.
“x86 architecture lies at the very heart of computing and AMD has continuously evolved and improved its core designs. The Bulldozer and Bobcat cores continue that evolutionary path and are designed to change the user’s experience with the resulting products.”
Highlights of the new cores include:
Bulldozer
- Multithreaded compute performance that balances dedicated and shared compute resources to provide a highly compact, high core count design easily replicated on a chip for performance scaling.
- New x86 instruction support (SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, and XOP including 4-operand FMAC).
- Advanced power management features.
- Manufactured on advanced 32nm process technology.
Bobcat
- Sub-one-watt capable operation.
- Out-of-order instruction execution for higher performance.
- Estimated 90 percent of today’s mainstream PC performance in half the area.
- Core power gating and a microarchitecture optimized for low power.
- Highly synthesizeable design that moves easily across manufacturing technologies.
