14 DAY TRIAL // Although, at this time, AMD isn't able to compete with Intel in terms of raw performance, all this seems set to change in the near future as Bulldozer-based CPUs are expected to put up a decent fight even when compared with Intel's fastest Sandy Bridge CPUs.
This was revealed when a slide detailing AMD's 2H 2011 product positioning made its way to the Web thanks to the Xbit Labs website.
The document explains how AMD's upcoming Bulldozer-based desktop processors, known internally as Zambezi, will stack up against Intel's Sandy Bridge processors as well as the average price of the systems these CPUs are supposed to power.
Taking a quick look at the slide, it becomes apparent that the eight-core AMD FX-81x0 processors should offer about the same performance as the Intel Core i7-26xx CPUs while the six-core and quad-core FX-6110 and FX-4110 models should go up against the Core i5-25xx SKUs.
The slide also reveals the names and specifications of four of the company's upcoming Llano processors as well as their positioning when compared to Intel's CPUs.
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 and each module is made 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.
As we revealed earlier today, in June of 2011, AMD plans to launch four Zambezi SKUs that will feature eight, six or four processing cores, a dual-channel DDR3 1866MHz memory controller and Turbo Core 2.0 support.
The chips will have a TDP of 125W or 95W, are compatible with the AM3+ socket and come with unlocked multipliers.
