Bobcat
If Bulldozer is the architecture that will compete with Nehalem, Bobcat is what will compete with Silverthorne. Bobcat is yet another ground up design from AMD, also due out in the 2009 timeframe, but it will address a more power constrained portion of the market. Systems that require a 1 - 10W TDP will use Bobcat, while Bulldozer is limited to the 10 - 100W range (obviously with some overlap between the two).Bobcat is a far simpler core than Bulldozer, which allows AMD to place it in ultra low power devices (think TVs, set top boxes and smart phones), but it also means that costs will be low. Much like Intel's Silverthorne, Bobcat will be a part of a new class of extremely low priced x86 cores designed primarily for the consumer electronics market.
We asked AMD's CTO, Phil Hester, how simple of a core Bobcat would be - and the answer he gave us was quite telling. Two years ago Intel used the following chart to illustrate the need for multi-core CPUs, the driving factor being that you can no longer get good performance scaling by simply improving single core performance:
What isn't depicted on this chart is the relationship of power consumption to all of this, but as you can guess, the power consumption curve looks much like the multi-core curve. Incremental improvements in single core performance now require exponential increases in power consumption, which was a major driving factor behind the move to multi-core. By achieving higher performance through minor core improvements and adding more cores, we can maintain the sort of year-over-year performance increases we need while keeping power consumption in check.
Phil told us to imagine a graph of power consumption vs. instructions per clock over the history of microprocessor cores, which you can imagine would be linear for a while, before turning exponential.
We are presently in the very non-linear portion of the chart, where minor increases in IPC require significant power expenditures. Bobcat, takes the non-linear portion of this graph and chops it off, going back to a much simpler x86 core that can be built extremely efficiently on today's manufacturing processes.
If you can imagine a Pentium or Pentium Pro class microprocessor, built on a 65nm or 45nm process, you can already guess that power consumption would be quite low. Now add in a few optimizations that AMD's designers have learned over the years and you may be able to picture what Bobcat's architecture might look like. It harks back to a much simpler time in x86 history, but then again that's exactly what's necessary for the type of low power, low cost devices that Bobcat will end up in.
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flashbacck - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Whoever decided those acronyms were necessary should be fired.fzkl - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Like mentioned, the obvious great benefit of having low power x86 chips on mobile phones is the software aspect. PC applications can now run on phones reducing aspirin needs for developers. However, what does this mean in terms of security? Can we see mobile phones needing frequent patches, antivirus, firewalls like in the case of desktops?If this were to be the case we would have successfully made a simple device like the mobile phone(in usage terms) a high maintenance product which a layman might have trouble with.
sheh - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
x86 doesn't imply any OS or API. Linux, which is commonly used today on all kinds of devices, can work just as well on x86. Conversely, nothing prevents virus writers from writing viruses for Linux running phones.beyoku - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
what happened? Was this article recelty pulled off or something?NDA???
Guuts - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Looks to me like he's trying to get the images working...erwos - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Fusion looks like it'll be a fantastic chip for UMPCs and laptops. Hopefully they'll manage to squeeze more than CPU one core on there, too. Bobcat looks similarly fun - x86 phones! VIA was also discussing this idea, and I could really go for it.That said, AMD is really under-delivering with Barcelona - I suspect the next few years will be pretty rough. Intel has set a low ceiling price for the Barcelonas ($270 - same as the Q6600), and that's not going to be good for AMD's margins.
mlau - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Embedded is ruled by ARM, Freescale, mips and sh derivates; amd and intel are going to have a tough time getting a super-ugly system like pc-x86 (with it's
legacy baggages "bios", "acpi" [you know, the stuff windows requires to run], ...) into that space.
Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
you do not need to have those things to run an x86 cpuloot at EFI for example, in use by apple on their x86 based macs = no more bios.
qpwoei - Sunday, July 29, 2007 - link
The real problem with x86 is that it's inherently not power efficient. To get good x86 performance requires lots of transistors and lots of power due to complex decoders and schedulers. A much simpler architecture like ARM requires very few transistors to run efficiently (at the expense of slightly less compact executable code), and is much more suited for battery-powered devices.Not to say that there won't be x86-powered devices in the future, just that I don't expect them to really gain much of a foothold in any place where battery life is important (eg: phones).
ss284 - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Return of the Jedi