Milan (Italy) - It is fair to say that Barcelona has not turned out the CPU core many hoped it would be and lots of people inside AMD would rather forget about this evolutionary step and quickly move on to the next architecture. Custom PC was able to squeeze some more information out of AMD about this next-gen architecture. It’s not much, but we now know for sure that it will be "completely different" from what AMD is selling today.
This confirmation comes from Giuseppe Amato, AMD’s technical director of sales & marketing for the EMEA region, one of the very few executives in the company who occasionally provide straight-forward answers.
"If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different," Custom PC quoted Amato. Of course, this does not really come as a surprise and was previously indicated. However, Amato also noted that the new architecture, which is expected to end up in the Bulldozer core, will "solve problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware."
This comment is likely to fuel a new rumor mill and if it was up to us, we’d be betting the farm on addressing bandwidth challenges and simplify virtualization. We also believe that we could be seeing a GPU influence and AMD may be applying its Fusion LEGO concept to this new architecture - in order to apply massively parallel designs.
AMD would do well to introduce a brand new architecture, and not soon enough. The company has been losing market share to Intel over the last year, and much of what it gained during the Athlon days have been lost. AMD has also posted many consecutive losses in revenue in the order of billions of dollars. AMD recently announced a brand new initiative to produce and sell its own brand of computers. Company executives say that they have thought about it long and hard, and feel that it makes sense for AMD to introduce a business class group of computers with a guaranteed 24-months life cycle, something AMD says is a concern for most businesses.
By Developing Third Data Crossbar, lying within L3 Cache, It will have some Guts that are HereToFor Unseen.
Signed
The only so called news i see is the quote "solve problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware." a natural result of the new architecture breaking the CPU down into modules that can be put together as AMD sees fit to target specific markets.
A good google search on the words AMD Bulldocer will tell you that and more.
I am very much looking forward to the return of 'co-processor' technology, as well as better use of the GPU residing in your graphics card. The overall capability of your desktop will be absolutely staggering compared to even the fastest x86 architecture (once the software issues have been ironed out of course). Naturally, mobile devices will also be follow.
The sooner we go away from letting the CPU do all the work the better in my opinion..I remember using such a design with the Commodore Amiga range of computers and the multi-tasking capability of that machine was streets ahead of everything else.
It's nice to hear they seem to have plans for the technology side of the biz, but ATM this is all just talk.
Even if it is better... it will either be in the distant future (2+ years) or they are telling people that people buying a K10 will be purchasing a soon to be obsolete architecture.
Neither condition is good - why would I upgrade to a K10 which is marginally better than a K8 (if they can get clocks up), rather than wait for this great new architecture?
I love my Phenom 9500(OMG B2 stepping), it's fast and stable. I upgraded from a Core2Duo e6600 to it, and it was a very worthwhile upgrade. I think it's safe to say that everyone who's posted thus far doesn't own one, they've just read propaganda articles + other peoples benchmarks, and go and repeat the information they've read to make themselves feel cool and knowledgeable. If Intel completes the copying of all of AMDs platform features(nehalem) first, then AMD might have some problems, but if Bulldozer comes out before, or around the same time, then nobody can say at this point in time who's going to win that round. For the time being, Hypertransport 3.0 FTW.
Today's heavy demands on eye-candy and frames-per-second would require a newer breed of co-processing architecture. Without argument, it is the GPU that has become the performance indicator and space-hog inside today's pc's, especially the triple-sli double-slot arrangements that eat power and slot space.
I have been advocating ever since the advent of SLI that a radical redesign of the PC is necessary. We are no longer using 16-color displays to run DOS windows full of 80x40 text, yet it is exactly this obsolete dinosaur spec that continues to manifest itself in the PC and drag down advancement.
But by using the gpu as a coprocessor, it opens up a whole new world of development. With the coming of 32 and 25nm technologies, it will be possible to place 4 gpu cores on a single chip. Now you can imagine a dual socket board where one socket has your 8-core cpu and the next socket has your 4-core gpu with it's on-die memory controller. That memory controller ties directly into ONE memory slot on the motherboard that allows you to add/change gpu memory. Add physics capability to the gpu and you begin to see the advantages again of the co-processor design architecture.
LAWL, AMD is a joke, just feeding the budget ppl might help them survive.
If you really think AMD is a joke then perhaps you should look at the work AMD has done in the IGP market..including the latest 780 chipsets. You may just find that these devices are much, much faster than Intel's offerings and also run on a small fabrication process. You may also want to talk to the University of Texas, who recently built one of the most powerful super-computers on the face of the planet, using AMD parts. AMD is not just about Phenom and considering AMD doesn't have nowhere near Intel's resources I think you are being a bit unfair.
Both corporations have roadmaps that incorporate GPGPU processing capability..it's just a matter of when, no if. AMD is good at developing the protocols on which these devices will run, and incorporating them into current designs. This is much easier with current AMD architecture than it is with Intel's. That's not to say AMD isn't having issues but I think you are being very unfair - remember just how long Intel has been playing catch-up and what it took to manufacture Core 2 architecture. That's how good AMD can be.
April 2008.
'Cray to build an almost-Petaflop supercomputer for the University of Tennessee '
..using AMD technology.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Cray-Supercomputer-UT,news-27904.html