AMD Unveils Bulldozer & Bobcat: 2011 Microachitectures

Anandtech ^ | November 11th, 2009 | Anand Lal Shimpi

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I spoke too soon. Earlier today I outlined AMD’s roadmap for 2010 - 2011. In 2011 AMD will introduce two next-generation microarchitectures: Bulldozer for the high end desktop and server space and Bobcat for the price/power efficient ultra mobile market. I originally said that AMD wasn’t revealing any more about its next-gen architectures, but AMD just proved me wrong as they unveiled the first block diagrams of both cores.

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First up, Bulldozer. I hinted at the architecture in this afternoon’s article:

“A major focus is going to be improving on one of AMD’s biggest weaknesses today: heavily threaded performance. Intel addresses it with Hyper Threading, AMD is throwing a bit more hardware at the problem. The dual integer clusters you may have heard of are the route AMD is taking...”

And here’s the block diagram:

Bulldozer: AMD's Latest Leap Forward, will it be another K8 to Intel's Sandy Bridge?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Earlier article he refers to:

AMD's 2010 - 2011 Roadmaps: ~1B Transistor Llano APU, Bobcat and Bulldozer

[historyrepeatz]

Where do the words “CAT” or “CATERPILLAR” come into play?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Haven’t read all of this yet .

[DManA]

Wonder if the Bobcat tm people are amused or disturbed.

[wastedyears]

Where do the words “CAT” or “CATERPILLAR” come into play?

When I come onto the thread. I always wanted to drive a bulldozer and Bobcat when I was a kid.

[ShadowAce]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the Second article linked (this is gonna be confusing )we have this:

*******************************EXCERPT*********************************

Server Roadmap

AMD’s previous CMO, Henri Richard, was a huge Ferrari fan. In turn, AMD became a sponsor of Ferrari’s Formula 1 team and some of AMD’s roadmap developed Italian-inspired codenames.

The Maranello platform is AMD’s high end server platform, due out in 2010. It supports the 8 and 12 core Magny Cours processors. These are multi-chip-modules with two quad or hexa core die on a single package.

With twice the die, you get twice the memory controllers. Magny Cours has four DDR3 memory channels. With more memory channels, Magny Cours needs a new, higher pincount socket which AMD is calling Socket G34. The chips will be branded as Opteron 6000 series.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Picked this out of the comments:

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RE: How does AMD count the cores? by Anand Lal Shimpi, 10 hours ago

Confirmed. 4 cores/8 threads, each Bulldozer core can handle two threads.

[garyhope]

Now if we can just get more 64 bit programs and software that’s compatible with everything,....

Anybody know why there aren’t more 64 bit programs and software out there that’s readily accessible now?

(And I may not know or understand anything I’m talking about here, but I just want more speed and Ram right now.)

Feel free to correct and educate me now. I want to know.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Send a letter to Adobe...they don’t seem to be in a hurry to get Flash, etc working on 64 bit....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

*******************************NOTE THAT**************************

Maranello due out in 2010 does NOT include the Bulldozer architecture

[Marine_Uncle]

Will get back to it later. Sounds interesting.

[TChris]

AMD seems to be seriously working on a fundamental shift in the PC architecture. It's almost as if we've come full circle to the floating-point co-processor, and a blistering fast GPU will be it. (Oh, and it does 3D graphics nicely too...)

I believe the guys at AMD are set to make some very cool things happen in the industry over the next few years.

MAN I love capitalist competition!

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

Send a letter to Adobe...they don’t seem to be in a hurry to get Flash, etc working on 64 bit....

And the patch that they use causes browser crashes sometimes.

If they don't hurry the hell up, somebody is going to create an alternative to Flash, and put that part of Adobe out of business.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Searching for alternatives to Flash found this:

HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash?

[krb]

Anybody know why there aren’t more 64 bit programs and software out there that’s readily accessible now?

Because in the Windows world, for the most part 32 bit apps work just fine on the architecture. If you recompile for 64 bit and you don't really need:

• access to more than 2GB of user memory
• usage of a 64 bit ALU

Then all you've done is waste more of your data cache performance (because all of your pointers are 8 bytes instead of 4 bytes), and you've only gotten marginally higher performance gains out of it (because of the extra registers they added when they went to 64 bit).

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And this just in...FR Thread I started:

Intel settles with AMD for $1.25bn

[SunkenCiv]

Well at its best, Flash is fine, but YouTube video looks like garbage on every platform.