You may’t say that AMD is ever boring. The company says its next-generation Bulldozer CPU core will take a novel solution to computing that goes beyond Hyper-Threading, which some believe could offer phenomenal performance.
Bulldozer makes a reasonably large break from how today’s multicores are constructed. Today’s dual-, quad-, and hexa-cores are based on single-cores strung together. They could share L2 or L3 cache, but generally are partitioned off from each other. With Bulldozer, the elemental building block of a multi-core chip changes from a walled off single core to more of a duplex. Two cores are tightly intertwined and share fetch, decode, floating-point scheduler, and dual 128-bit fused-multiply-accumulate units, or FPUs. AMD says each module includes dedicated integer schedulers, pipelines, and L1 cache.
This, AMD says, is much superior to Intel’s Hyper-Threading, that may hamper when a similar resources are under load.
Hyper-Theading was introduced by Intel in 2002 and takes a single-core and shares its resources by creating a virtual core. Within the Pentium 4 days, HT added a 10 to 15 percent performance increase, and in Core i7 chips, performance might be boosted 20 to 25 percent counting on the applying.
Just adding dedicated, partitioned cores is a ” brute force” approach that wastes resources, AMD says. With its shared resources, Bulldozer can reduce power consumption and shrink the die size, which in turn lowers the pricetag to supply the chip. AMD says the server version of its Bulldozer chip should deliver 33 percent more cores and a 50 percent increase in ” throughput” inside the same power envelope as a 12-core Magny-Cours Opteron chip.
” One of many important things this is that Bulldozer is among the first all-new designs from AMD in a decade,” says analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64. Brookwood says one of several more exciting design changes in Bulldozer is its ability to dynamically reallocate resources on single-threaded tasks. On a standard dual-core, the resources for each walled off core can not be combined. In Bulldozer, all the resources of the module is additionally thrown at it a thread.
” The one-core performance on some floating-point applications is going to be mind-boggling,” Brookewood says.
AMD officials say Bulldozer is being targeted at servers and performance desktop machines. The excellent news is that Bulldozer can be drop-in compatible with most present high-end servers. The bad news is that it won’t be compatible with existing AM3 boards. Instead, AMD says it’s going to introduce a new AM3+ socket. These sockets might be backward compatible with older chips so it’s essential to drop a Phenom II X6 in it. In keeping with AMD, Bulldozer might be built on a new 32nm process at Global Foundries.
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