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."
