Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, just showed off its next-gen processor technology at the Hot Chips 2010 conference in Silicon Valley, detailing the evolved nature of its upcoming Bulldozer and Bobcat lineup of chips (check out the video at the end of the article).
"The new [cores], codenamed 'Bulldozer' for high-performance PC and server markets, and 'Bobcat' for low-power notebook and small form-factor desktop markets, were designed from the ground-up to address specific requirements and compute workloads," said Chekib Akrout, a Senior VP at AMD.
AMD has apparently taken its x86 processor technology to the next level, radically evolving its core designs from the first time since the original Opteron x86 and K7 processors. To highlight this new ground-up approach, Akrout went on to say: "x86 architecture lies at the very heart of computing and AMD has continuously evolved and improved its core designs. The Bulldozer and Bobcat cores continue that evolutionary path and are designed to change the user's experience with the resulting products."
One of the biggest features of the new Bulldozer architecture is that it will support a new sort of SMT (simultaneous multithreading) and not the traditional CMP (chip multi-processing). This will finally allow two or more threads to run on a single core, working simultaneously. How this technology compares to Intel’s Hyper-Threading is not yet known, though it has been noted that with AMD’s novel SMT approach, two threads will share a single front-end, but, use separate integer execution resources. According to Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes, for this type of SMT to work, all shared code and data storage components of the processor must be “either replicated or partitioned”, giving equal priority to each thread when sharing resources, in such a way that buffer entries don’t remain empty when there’s no second thread.
