14 DAY TRIAL // In the second week of June, AMD will officially unveil the highly anticipated Bulldozer architecture and the company has recently confirmed that the chips will feature two different Turbo CORE modes, depending on the load placed on the processor.
This information came to light when John Fruehe, director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD, responded to a comment on the company's official blog.
“We are not releasing clock speeds nor are we releasing the clock speeds under Turbo CORE, but I am very comfortable that those looking for great scalability and lots of clock speed will be impressed with the Turbo CORE.”
“Especially the all core boost that gives you up to 500MHz with all cores active in most non-FP workloads. For lightly threaded applications, with half of the cores inactive you can expect even higher levels of turbo.”
In the same blog post, Fruehe also revealed some information regarding the power consumption of the Bulldozer architecture.
According to AMD's representative, Bulldozer chips are more energy efficient than their predecessors in both full load and in idle modes as the improved power gating technologies added to the chip keep less of their circuits active, no matter the workload involved.
]The most impressive power saving numbers are achieved in idle mode thanks to the new C6 gating which automatically cuts the power sent to a module when this hasn't been used for a pre-determined period of time.
AMD's design engineers estimate that this technology “will drop the power consumption by up to 95% in idle over the previous generation of processor cores.”
The first Bulldozer processors are expected to arrive on June 7 at the E3 expo where AMD will launch four desktop processors based on the Zambezi core with prices ranging from $190 to $320.
