AMD Gives Early Hint at Bulldozer Performance

By Marcus Yam
published

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."

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
84 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Mr Pizza
    GO AMD!
    Reply
  • damasvara
    Less cores, better performance???.. (not following)

    A dual core is good enough for me though... lol
    Reply
  • mcnuggetofdeath
    I've got a friend who played around with an ES. Said it was about 12% better clock for clock than i7 in games. This was with the 8 core version. He assured me it's the next CPU he'll get. Based on that, I may do the same.
    Reply
  • duckmanx88
    damasvaraLess cores, better performance???.. (not following)A dual core is good enough for me though... lol
    where in the article are you reading less cores?
    Reply
  • jonpaul37
    Still not clear if Bulldozer will run on Socket AM3 motherboards though, would love to find that out because i would get a 965 and AM3 board if it did...
    Reply
  • DjEaZy
    ... wuhaa!!! and... how about desktop version?
    Reply
  • squiggs77
    So if 12 cores = 100% performance and 16 cores = 150% performance, then there is a 12.5% increase in performance per core. I don't know if that's enough to dethrone Intel in the high end.
    Reply
  • It does not sound like they are targeting the consumer very much. 8 cores is all well and good, but only if they end up matching Intel's performance per core which their current Phenom II line does not. Quad cores have been out for years now, and consumer software still rarely makes good use of the extra cores.
    Reply
  • hellwig
    Is "Magny Cours" pronounced "Many Cores"? First time I saw that codename, I thought it was a horrible pun. However, google tells me its a city in France or something (which matches the AMD naming scheme), so I'm guessing it's not "many cores".

    damasvaraLess cores, better performance???.. (not following)
    Try "not reading". It says when you compare their 16-core processor to their current 12-core processor, you get 50% improvement with 33% more cores. That's more cores, not less.
    Reply
  • Haserath
    jonpaul37Still not clear if Bulldozer will run on Socket AM3 motherboards though, would love to find that out because i would get a 965 and AM3 board if it did...Uhh..?
    ...it will be backwards compatible so you won’t need to change anything to start using the processor.
    It looks like it will support AM3.
    Reply