14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors regarding AMD's plans to introduce the Bulldozer processor during CeBIT 2011 seem to have been confirmed as the company has just posted an announcement that is titled “AMD unveils new processors” on the fair's website.
“U.S. CPU and chip manufacturer AMD will be unveiling its new processors at CeBIT 2011. These new models are said to outperform the current top models of its Phenom-II series by 50 percent,” reads the announcement.
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, as much as 2048KB of L2 cache, and 8MB of shared L3 cache.
Recently, during the ISSCC conference, AMD has further detailed the structure of its Bulldozer chip by providing pictures of the chip's core modules.
As it can be distinguished from the images, each module has a shared microcode ROM, and the cores share a branch predictor, instruction fetch, and instruction decode units.
Unlike the company's previous processors, Bulldozer will feature a more energy efficient design that allows for power gating at the module level.
As we previously reported, the modular design allowed AMD to achieve a higher core count without having to sacrifice to much in terms of performance as a dual-core module delivers only 7-8% less throughput than a native dual-core chip.
The server version of the 8-core Bulldozer processor will be called Valencia (Opteron 4200-series), while the desktop version is dubbed Zambezi.
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, while Opteron CPUs will also pack a quad-channel memory controller. (via ComputerBase)
