AMD Discloses Bobcat & Bulldozer Architectures at Hot Chips 2010
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 24, 2010 1:33 AM ESTFinal Words
The Bulldozer and Bobcat architectures are the update AMD has needed badly over the past couple of years. AMD has done reasonably well in the mainstream market despite not having them, but I’m eager to see both in action.
I’m pretty much sold on Bobcat. The architecture looks like an out of order Atom, which is exactly what we need to drive the performance of netbooks up. I’m curious to see exactly how well Ontario and other Bobcat based designs perform vs. Atom and CULV notebooks, but it looks like AMD will at least have the architecture to compete in the small form factor portable market in a major way.
Note that we still don’t have full disclosure on the AMD GPU that’s going to be paired with Bobcat. We’ve said that ION really improves on the netbook experience but doesn’t make up for the anemic Atom CPU. With AMD’s Ontario we may get the best of both worlds: a faster CPU and competent GPU.
We’re also not that far away from Bobcat availability. The real trick here will be making sure that AMD’s partners are lined up to deliver some killer designs based on the part. After the recent FTC settlement there shouldn’t be any pressure on any OEMs to avoid shipping competitive Bobcat based netbooks/notebooks next year. Let’s hope AMD can deliver as we definitely need competition in that market.
Bulldozer I'm excited about, but more cautious - partly because we don't know what Sandy Bridge will bring, and partly because we're further away from Bulldozer than Bobcat. In many ways the architecture looks to be on-par with what Intel has done with Nehalem/Westmere. We finally have a wider front end, branch fusion, power gating/true turbo and more aggressive prefetching. Whether or not AMD can surpass Sandy Bridge’s performance really boils down to how many Bulldozer modules you get at what price. If 2 module (4-core) Bulldozer CPUs go up against dual-core Sandy Bridge things could get very interesting.
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mino - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From the HW design POW, those pipes are "MMX/3Dnow" class stuff.They run SSE3, but they are still MMX-class.
There is a reason Bulldozer has "FMAC" written there ...
Kiijibari - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
... it is stupid to name a circuit after a deprecated ISA extension and not after its function.If its doing stuff like 3dnow and mmx then call it Shuffel / permutation pipeline but not MMX ...
The FMAC is the best example .. why is it written FMAC in that case and not SSE5/AVX/XOP ?
KonradK - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
Depracated does not mean prohibited. Also there are existing MMX programs and other than Windows 64bit operating systems and compilers other than MSVSC.MMX and x87 is prohibited in 64bit kernel code.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff545910%2...
iwod - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From the design of Bulldozer's FPU it is cleared that AMD want Multi Threaded FPU to run on OpenCL. While the dual Integer looks interesting now. It is up against the SandyBridge, the architecture that is suppose to leap again like Pentium 4 to C2D. And if Bulldozer comes any later, it will be up against the die shrink of SandyBridge, Ivy Bridge. Things dont look so good in here.It is mainstream / low end that looks very interesting. I am currently using a Pentium M 1.8Ghz Dothan with 2GB DDR Ram. With a Radeon 1600 Graphics. I dont get hardware acceleration from GPU, 720P is just barely playable with some very fast software decoder. It is fast enough to watch some 460p youtube and most of my day web serving.
Now if Bobcat have similar or higher IPC then Dothan. A Quad Core Bobcat with Radeon 5000 64 SP will still be within reasonable die size on 40nm, It will be cheap when it drops to 32nm or lower. Most of us dont need SUPER FAST computer. And Bobcat with Radeon 5 Series or Higher Plus a Fast SSD are all we need.
aegisofrime - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I don't recall Sandy Bridge being a revolutionary leap. Everyone has been saying that it's more of evolutionary, the main difference being the addition of AVX.I REALLY REALLY REALLY hope that AMD announces later today what socket Bulldozer will be on... I desperately need more video encoding performance. I have a AM2+ motherboard and that bloody 1055T is singing it's siren song to me every night. If Bulldozer is on AM3 I can get an AM3 board and the 1055T and do a quick upgrade to Bulldozer.
Come on AMD. Your customers need more information to make an informed decision!
mino - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Buldozer gen1 == primarily servers=> 16/12-core (MCM) Socket G34 (current platfrom)
=> 8/6/4-core Socket G32 (current platfrom)
Bulldozer Desktop (hopefully before X-mas 2011)
=> 8?/6/4-core Socket AM3R2(or AM3+, whatever they call it)
Pirks - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Huh? You want more video encoding perfomance and you think about upgrading CPU? What kind of idiocy is that? Use 480GTX with Badaboom and your video encoding speed won't be matched by CPUs of year 2020 or maybe even 2030 :Paegisofrime - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Don't talk if you don't know what you are talking about. No GPU encoder out there is able to match x264 quality or SPEED wise. And the huge flaw in your statement is that Badaboom doesn't even support Fermi GPUs right now.Have you done any serious video encoding before, or are you just trolling as usual?
ChronoReverse - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Indeed. I would try out CUDA encoders every once in a while in hopes that I could at least get the quality of x264 at MINIMUM quality but they can't even match that.Since x264 at minimum quality encodes slightly quicker (on my quad core) a CUDA encoder does (on my GTX260) and still yields better quality, I really appreciate faster CPU's.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Hate to say it but unless GPU acceleration is available, the i7 is a far better
choice for video encoding. I still use a 6000+ for most tasks, but numerous
article reviews made it quite clear that AMD was not the best choice for
video encoding, so I went with an i7 860 4GHz. Pricing was surprisingly good,
speed is excellent.
Ian.