AMD Gives Early Hint at Bulldozer Performance
Bulldozer is a very aggressive name.
AMD last week launched a new blog section dedicated to talking about Bulldozer, one of its next-generation core technologies.
John Fruehe, director of product marketing for server/workstation products at AMD, started with a description of what Bulldozer is: "a brand new design featuring up to 8 cores for client products and up to 16 cores for server products. Bulldozer will feature a new floating point unit that can support up to 256-bit floating point execution, which will boost the performance for technical applications that rely on floating point math. There will be some new software instructions that will be supported, allowing for greater performance and flexibility, but, it will be backwards compatible so you won’t need to change anything to start using the processor."
In AMD fashion, the company is aiming to make Bulldozer chips compatible with existing platforms. This means that Opteron 6000 Series platform (G34 socket-based) and Opteron 4000 Series platform (C32-socket based) are compatible with Bulldozer. The 6000 series will be home to the upcoming “Interlagos” (16-core) processor, while the 4000 series will be fit for the upcoming 8-core “Valencia” processor. Bulldozer will also support DDR3.
AMD said it wasn't going to reveal anything on performance until launch sometime in 2011 (with no more specific date other than the year). What Fruehe did share, however, was the jump in performance in relation to Magny Cours.
"From a performance standpoint, if you compare our 16-core Interlagos to our current 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors (code named “Magny Cours”) we estimate that customers will see up to 50% more performance from 33% more cores," Fruehe wrote. "This means we expect the per core performance to go in the right direction — up."

where in the article are you reading less cores?
A dual core is good enough for me though... lol
where in the article are you reading less cores?
Try "not reading". It says when you compare their [NEW] 16-core processor to their current 12-core processor, you get 50% improvement with 33% more cores. That's more cores, not less.
Uhh..?
It looks like it will support AM3.
2011 should definitely be interesting for the CPU market.
it will dethrone intels Core i7 890X at the moment by a significant margin, intel will only have 32nm 6 and 8 core I7 and i9 at the time of bulldozer, actually intels 2011 road map look rather plain
From the below comment it looks like the server segment is backwards compatible but there was no mention of the desktop segment...
So, everyone, would you prefer (assuming same clock per clock performance) a 5.5GHz quad core or a 3GHz 16 core. If i7 voltage scaling is anything to give a guess on, they'd have around the same TDP.
When will we receive more great 65watt chips though? There were some sweet C2Q chips. I'd prefer a less exotic cooing setup (and a much cheaper PSU). At this point in time, when there is little use for most people for anything over a 2GHz dual core, efficiency overshadows performance (in the mainstream). But not the Atom approach (low performance, yet inefficient). Even gamers don't need quad cores most days. Of course, there will be the enthusiasts who still lust for power.
Anyone else want a 32nm i7 930 at 2.8GHz with a 65 watt TDP?
Now I agree that having both 1156 and 1366 was stupid....but you can easily research the parts and know what you are getting yourself into before buying a system or building one.....
of course if AMD can pull off the GPGPU thing then all this talk about cores (virtual or otherwise) could become a moot point
I think the french pronunciation is the correct one, even though in Italy some AMD family names can be pretty interesting; For example the name "Duron" in italian can be translated as "Ready for Sex". And Magny Cours was a F1 Track (it isn't used anymore)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_Nevers_Magny-Cours
Riiiight. Hoping against all hopes, are we?