14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that 2011 will be the year when Advanced Micro Devices catches up once again with Intel in terms of raw processing power, at least according to what recent reports concerning Bulldozer claim.
To enthusiasts, it may seem like a lifetime sine AMD was last able to truly say it had CPUs on par with Intel's strongest chips.
Those times ended after the passing of the Athlon K8-based processors, back when Athlon was a high-end brand, not Phenom.
Even last year, Intel's strongest six-core Gulftown chip was well ahead of AMD's best Thuban (Phenom II X6), both in terms of might and time of arrival to market.
Now, according to information that Fudzilla claims to have uncovered, it may very well occur that Advanced Micro Devices will once again match Intel, or at least get close to doing so.
As before, Intel's most powerful next-generation central processing unit, on the consumer front, will be part of the Core i7 lineup.
AMD's Bulldozer is the architecture known to be intended for high-end chips, and the report says that, according to some leaked initial test scores, there shouldn't be much difference between the two.
Bulldozer will spawn both six-core and eight-core processors and are scheduled to make their appearance by the end of this year's second quarter.
Samples are, in fact, already circulating, otherwise no test results would be available to leak to Fudzilla's so-called industry source.
It is built on the 32nm manufacturing process and seems to not be suffering from any sort of yield issues, meaning that no launch delays or supply problems should arise.
Again, AMD will play the affordability card, meaning that, even in the case where Core i7 stays faster, which is likely, lower prices for Bulldozer X6 and X8 should make up for it.
What remains to be seen is if this is enough to significantly erode Intel's still massive CPU market share.