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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Dustin Sklavos - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Comments like this really bother me. You may not care about netbooks, but a lot of people do. Current ones don't pass the grandma test - your grandmother can do whatever task she needs to on them, like check e-mail, browse the internet, watch HD video - and any advance here is welcome.Generally speaking a netbook is not supposed to be your main machine, but something you can chuck into your bag and take with you and do a little work on here and there. I write a lot, and have to work on other peoples' computers from time to time, so a netbook that doesn't completely suck is invaluable to me. Netbook performance is dismal right now, but Bobcat could successfully fix this market segment.
So no, you're not interested in netbooks and you'd rather be raked through hot coals than purchase one. But that just means they're not useful - TO YOU. There are a lot of people here interested in what Bobcat can do for these portables, and I count myself among them.
Lonbjerg - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
I don't care that many people care for mediocore performance in a crappy format.Not matter what you do with a netbook, it will alway be lacking.
I don't care what gandma wants (she will buy intel BTW, due to Intel's brand recognition)
I don't care for Atom either.
Or i3
Or i5
Or Phenom
I do care about a replacement for my i7 @ 3.5GHz...
Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
I'm trying to figure out why you're commenting on any of this at all.flipmode - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Seriously Anand, it is crummy that I cannot find a whole section of your website. I hate to spam an entirely separate article, but how completely lame it is to have to spend 15 minutes doing a Google advanced search to find the Anandtech article I'm looking for.One of the very, very few truly Class A+ hardware sites on the internet - you can count all the members of that class on one hand - and you make it seriously hard to find past articles and you completely OMIT a link to an entire category of your reviews. Insane.
Please put a link to the "System" section somewhere. Please!
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Our system section hasn't had a lot of updates, but you can get there via:http://www.anandtech.com/tag/systems
In fact, most common tags can be put there (i.e. /AMD, /Intel, /NVIDIA, /HP, /ASUS, etc.) The only catch is that many of the tags will only bring up articles since the site redesign, so you'll want to stick with the older main topics for some areas. Hope that helps.
mino - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
"so I’m wondering if we’ll see Bulldozer adopt a 3 - 4 channel DDR3 memory controller"Bulldozer will use current G34 platform. Hoe that answers your wonder :)
VirtualLarry - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
BullDozer sounds like amazing stuff. I wonder, if the way that they have arranged int units into modules, if that means that we will be getting more cores for our dollars, compared to Intel. More REAL cores, I mean. I'm just a little disappointed that the int pipelines went from 3 ALU to 2 ALU, I hope that doesn't affect performance too much.gruffi - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
Integer instruction pipelines are increased from 3 to 4. That's 33% more peak throughput. The number of ALUs/AGUs to keep these pipelines busy is meaningless without knowing details. K10 has 3 ALUs and 3 AGUs, but they are bottlenecked and partially idling most of the time. Bulldozer can do more operations per cycle while drawing less power, even with only 2 ALUs and 2 AGUs. How can that be disappointing?ezodagrom - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I think Bulldozer has the potential to be really competitive, mainly because Sandy Bridges looks quite unimpressive.In a recent leaked powerpoint from Intel, apparently until Q3 2011 the best Intel CPU is still going to be Gulftown based, possibly Core i7 990X. According to Intel benchmarks on the leaked powerpoint, the best Sandy Bridge, that is, Core i7 2600, apparently will be around 15% to 25% better than the i7 870, with the i7 980X being 25% to 35% better than the i7 2600.
Mat3 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I have a question.. it was earlier speculated that BD would have four ALU pipelines per integer core. It was thought that one way they could make use of them was to send a branch down two pipes and take the correct result. Obviously this isn't the case, but my question is, why not? Wouldn't it be better to do that and just discard the branch predictors entirely? Why isn't that better?