14 DAY TRIAL // Today's launch of the FX-Series processors hasn't been the success that everybody has hoped for and AMD knows that, so in the following years the company plans to improve the speed of the Bulldozer cores by 10 to 15 percent with each new generation that arrives.
This information was made public by AMD itself and the chip maker states that the performance increase will come from a series of improvements to the architecture's IPC, timing and frequencies.
Energy efficiency should also get better with each new core, which definitely seems like the right thing to do considering the high power consumption of the current FX-Series CPUs.
The first Bulldozer-derived core to get these new improvements is Piledriver, which is going to be used in the 2012 Trinity APUs and later in the 32nm successor of today’s Zambezi desktop incarnation.
According to AMD, the 10-15% performance increase in Piledriver will come from IPC improvements like structure size increases (about one third of the total performance), and power optimizations that reduce consumption.
The latter will enable AMD's Piledriver core to reach higher frequencies at a constant TDP.
Right after Piledriver, the next core to get this performance increase is called Steamroller and is expected to arrive in 2013, while 2014 will see the introduction of the Excavator core which should bring a similar performance hike.
AMD hasn't been specific about how it intends to reach its 10-15% goal with Steamroller and Excavator, but it sees the potential and is confident that the performance is there.
AMD has launched its first desktop processors based on the Bulldozer architecture earlier today, but despite all the publicity that surrounded the FX-Series performance isn't up to par as the chips lag behind Intel's Core i5-2500K is most benchmarks, while some tests even place them after the Phenom II X6 1100T. (via Tom's Hardware)
