AMD Bulldozer Will Make Its Official Debut During CeBIT 2011

In development for over five years now, AMD's Bulldozer architecture will be finally introduced by AMD during the CeBIT 2011 fair that is going to take place in Hannover, Germany between the 1st and 5th of March.

The report comes via the ati-forum.de website that has learned from several industry-related sources that AMD will present its new Bulldozer CPU during the fair, various motherboard makers also planning to do the same with their AM3+ solutions.

No other details are available at this time, but the report seems to reaffirm the fact that AMD is getting ready to launch the first Bulldozer CPUs in the second quarter of 2011, an April release being highly plausible.

Bulldozer is AMD's next-generation high-performance CPU architecture that was designed from the ground up in order to eliminate some of the redundancies that come with traditional multi-core designs.

As a result, the chip uses a modular construction, each module being comprised of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each, and as much as 2048KB of L2 cache.

Just like the 8MB of L3 cache, the Level 2 memory will also be shared between the modules.

All the chips will support AMD's Turbo Core technology, offer native DDR3-1866 memory support, and one or more Hyper Transport 3.1 links.

In addition, desktop processors feature a built-in dual-channel memory controller while server CPUs get quad-channel memory support.

The new chips are built using GlobalFoundries' 32nm SOI (silicon on insulator) fabrication process and the desktop CPUs are compatible with motherboards based on the upcoming AM3+ socket.

As previous leaks have let us know, initially, AMD plans to introduce three chipsets, dubbed 990FX, 990X and 970, the main difference between them being the number of available PCI Express 2.0 lanes.

Performance wise, an eight-core Bulldozer processor is expected to be, on average, 50% faster than a Core i7 900-series CPU.