Advanced Micro Devices was to detail the performance characteristics of two new cores for x86 computer architectures Tuesday at the Hot Chips 22 conference in Palo Alto, Calif. AMD said the new Bulldozer core for servers and high-performance PCs, and the forthcoming Bobcat core for low-power notebooks and other small form-factor devices, are central to the chipmaker’s future road map.
Bulldozer’s multi-threaded performance balances dedicated and shared resources to provide a highly compact, high-core-count design, AMD executives noted. By contrast, AMD’s Bobcat platform is geared for flexibility, low power, and size, and can even become scaled and combined with other IP in accelerated processing unit (APU) configurations, they said.
“With CPUs and APUs built from these core implementations, we expect our customers to deliver a new wave of innovative PC form factors and high-performance computing experiences,” said AMD Senior Vice President Chekib Akrout.
A Memory Controller Overhaul
According to AMD, Bulldozer’s dedicated resources include two integer-execution cores that deliver true core functionality. “By presenting two true cores to the operating system and applications, two simultaneous threads can be executed more efficiently than two threads running on a single integer core,” the chipmaker said.
Multi-threading on a single core often can be inconsistent and only deliver incremental gains — or, under some workloads, even result in negative throughput, AMD observed. “With dedicated cores and parallel thread execution, Bulldozer offers more consistent results and superior throughput,” the chipmaker said.
Moreover, the new 16-core Bulldozer platform will feature AMD’s first major memory controller overhaul since the introduction of the quad-core AMD Opteron in 2007, noted John Fruehe, director of product marketing for servers and workstations at AMD.
“Back then, everyone was looking at virtualization, but not as many were deploying it,” Fruehe wrote in a blog. “These new memory-controller enhancements were designed with virtualization in mind so…