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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ROad86 - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
I think without being a pc expert that amd was trying to maximaze the multi-thread perfomance in less die size and being more efficient at power consumption. But i believe that they are still developing Bulldozer in order to maximaze single thread perfomance too. In desktop not much applications are threaded well in enough so they have to be competive in single thread perfomance too. Thats why I believe they dont announce release date yet. Among side the new manufactaring procces at 32 nm and I think the waiting for the release of sandy-bridge in order to see how better are intel new processors, the release date will be probably Q4 2011. But these are just speculations.Vallwesture - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
It has been over two years...ROad86 - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
New architecture, completly new design, maybe softaware too needs too be optimazed(windows 7 for example), in the end lets hope to bring something truly amazing. On paper it does but lets wait for reviews!KonradK - Thursday, August 26, 2010 - link
"The basic building block is the Bulldozer module. AMD calls this a dual-core module because it has two independent integer cores and a single shared floating point core that can service instructions from two independent threads"I'm curious whether CPU shedulers can distinguish between cores located in the same module from cores located in other modules of Bulldozer .
Because two cores located in the same module share one FPU unit , running two FPU heavy threads on two cores located in the same module and leaving cores in other modules idle would be at least unoptimal.
Simen1 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
From page 6: "Aggressive prefetching usually means there’s a good amount of memory bandwidth available so I’m wondering if we’ll see Bulldozer adopt a 3 - 4 channel DDR3 memory controller in high end configurations similar to what we have today with Gulftown."AMD already have a 4 channel DDR3 design. Its in the Opteron 6100-line of processors on the G34 socket (LGA1974). AMD have promised it will be compatible with future bulldozer-based processors.
liem107 - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
I wonder how bobcat would fare against the VIA Nano. Considering VIA s portfolio, it would be a good aquisition for Nvidia for example to get their hands on a fairly good x86 core and license.