14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few years ago AMD Opteron server chips delivered the ultimate performance when it came down to pure processing power and AMD seems set to bring those days back with the upcoming Bulldozer architecture, the Sunnyvale-based company just announcing they will start shipping parts based on the Bulldozer architecture in Q3 next year.
According to a PC World report that cites an AMD official, the very first Bulldozer processors to reach us go by the code name of Interlagos, come with up to 16 cores and are designed to be used in mid to high-end servers as replacements for the Opteron 6100 series (code named Magny-Cours).
Since these are meant as an easy upgrade for the present day Magny-Cours CPUs, the processors will be socket-compatible with these offerings, AMD enabling its customers to quickly move to Bulldozer with no additional motherboard costs.
However, this won't be AMD's only Bulldozer offering to come next year as the company plans to release another chip, code named Valenicia, that will feature up to eight cores to replace existing Opteron 4100 chips.
Although the company official declined to provide any further informations regarding the release date of Valencia, we do know that internal AMD benchmarks have showed that Bulldozer can show up to 50 percent performance improvements, when compared with its predecessor.
This speed improvements will come thanks to a flexible architecture that was designed for sharing some resources across cores (such as the floating point unit), AMD also improving its internal bus architecture.
This latest news comes right after AMD has updated its server road-map in order to accommodate a 20-core chip code-named Terramar as well as a 10-core chip code-named Sepang, both of these coming sometime in 2012 as replacements for the first generation Bulldozer CPUs.
Unfortunately, we still don't know when Bulldozer will make it into the consumer sector, but the very first performance numbers (official or not) for Bulldozer should come sometime in Q2 2011, as this is when AMD's chips will start to go into mass production.