Small preview image

Processor maker AMD has been surprisingly generous with information on the upcoming future. during Financial Analyst Day it presented two ”new” processor architectures that will launch in 2011. Bulldozer and Bobcat where the first will be found in regular computers; desktop, server and notebooks. Bobcat on the other hand is intended for ultrathin and energy efficient systems with a small and efficient CPU core.



Both architectures will have a GPU circuit baked into the processor, where AMD’s already renowned Llano CPU will be one of the first.



The Bulldozer architecture focus on one of AMD’s greater weaknesses today, multi-threading performance. Intel has its HyperThreading technology and with more and more multi-threading optimizations in games and applications AMD needs to take after. Bulldozer will do that thanks to a new design of the CPU cores. Like Intel, AMD uses more transistors for handling more threads, which should result in better performance but also a bigger and more expensive core.



It will not divide floating point calculations but instead use dedicated hardware and count on the integrated graphics circuit to pull some of the workload. An exciting solution that in a way makes the CPU core directly dependent of the GPU.


Bobcat is in turn an energy efficient architecture that will do with less than 1W of power. This makes it a direct competitor to Intel’s Atom processor. It’s hard to say what the market will look like in 2011 but AMD promises high performance from this tiny chip. Both architectures will be made with 32nm technology.



Alas, AMD has little to show for the year to come. It has interesting news to show, but the revolutionizing bits will not be around until 2011. With this early showcasing of the roadmap it urges consumers and partners to stay confident up until the big launches.

Leave a Reply

Please Login to comment
  Subscribe  
Notifiera vid