Thursday, November 12th 2009
AMD to Sample Bulldozer Architecture in 2010, Sets Product Priorities
As part of its Financial Analyst Day for 2009, AMD listed out its priorities for the year ahead, looking into 2010. While the company has lived up to its development targets for this year by releasing a full-fledged lineup of PC and server processors built on the 45 nm process, increasing its market share with graphics products, and releasing the first DirectX 11 compliant (back then referred to as 'next generation') GPU, the year ahead looks equally ambitious for AMD.
AMD set the following product priorities for 2010: to deliver four new winning PC platforms in the first half of 2010, improve battery life of its notebook platform, expand homegrown DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL developer tools, propagate DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks, launch the company's first 12-core Opteron processor, and more interestingly, sample the company's next-generation "Bulldozer" architecture to industry customers, along with sampling the company's first Fusion-design "Bobcat" processor, which integrates the CPU with GPU, along with sampling some of the company's first processors built on the 32 nm manufacturing process.
The four PC platforms AMD is referring to, are "Leo" and "Dorado", which succeed the current "Dragon" and "Pisces/Kodiak" as the new enthusiast and mainstream platforms, respectively. Leo brings with it the "Thuban" 6-core desktop processor, the company's 8-series platform core-logic, and DirectX 11 compliant discrete graphics, while "Dorado" continues to use Athlon II series processors with up to 4 cores, albeit on AMD's value 8-series core-logic (which continues to integrate DirectX 10.1 compliant IGP). It is in 2011, that processors up to 8 cores, based on the Bulldozer architecture, start to appear. AMD went as far as to disclose that the enthusiast-grade processor carrying the codename "Zambezi" will continue to come in the AM3 package, so now it is clear that the socket has a long road ahead. "Danube" and "Nile" are the other two platforms that AMD will introduce in H1, both are notebook platforms, which bring to the table support for up to 4 cores, DDR3 memory, and DirectX 10.1 compliant integrated, or DirectX 11 compliant discrete graphics, to the table.
Battery life is one of the biggest selling points of a notebook platform. It does not pay to have a powerful processor that is also power-hungry. AMD intends to bring the power footprint of its notebook platforms down by at least 25 percent. Backed with WHQL signed GPGPU drivers, AMD has already shown keen interest in GPGPU standards, particularly open standards such as Microsoft DirectCompute and OpenCL. It will keep this interest alive by continuing to make more developer tools and hardware optimizations in this area.
Propagating DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks is another priority, though it is not likely to come in the form of integrated graphics, going by the roadmap slides. With energy-effecient GPUs already developed across top market segments, it will only be a matter of designing mobile graphics boards. For the enterprise market, AMD will introduce its first 12-core processors codenamed "Magny Cours", and 6000/4000 series platforms. This is when AMD's own server core-logic re-enters the server market under a completely new design team. The core-logic will compete with offerings from NVIDIA and Broadcom.
Finally the one point that caught our interest is the one that AMD highlighted in its slide. AMD's next-generation processor architecture codenamed "Bulldozer", will start sampling in 2010. It should tell us that development of the architecture may have already commenced. Bulldozer is an architecture designed from ground up, and ideally, it does not inherit the design from its eight-year old K8 turned K10(.5) architecture. The other big development is that of the processor codenamed "Bobcat" that integrates graphics processing onto the processor package. It is unlikely to be the first of its kind, as rival Intel has already sampled such processors. It is in this year that AMD will also sample its first 32 nm processors, although no market availability of such processors is indicated.
AMD set the following product priorities for 2010: to deliver four new winning PC platforms in the first half of 2010, improve battery life of its notebook platform, expand homegrown DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL developer tools, propagate DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks, launch the company's first 12-core Opteron processor, and more interestingly, sample the company's next-generation "Bulldozer" architecture to industry customers, along with sampling the company's first Fusion-design "Bobcat" processor, which integrates the CPU with GPU, along with sampling some of the company's first processors built on the 32 nm manufacturing process.
The four PC platforms AMD is referring to, are "Leo" and "Dorado", which succeed the current "Dragon" and "Pisces/Kodiak" as the new enthusiast and mainstream platforms, respectively. Leo brings with it the "Thuban" 6-core desktop processor, the company's 8-series platform core-logic, and DirectX 11 compliant discrete graphics, while "Dorado" continues to use Athlon II series processors with up to 4 cores, albeit on AMD's value 8-series core-logic (which continues to integrate DirectX 10.1 compliant IGP). It is in 2011, that processors up to 8 cores, based on the Bulldozer architecture, start to appear. AMD went as far as to disclose that the enthusiast-grade processor carrying the codename "Zambezi" will continue to come in the AM3 package, so now it is clear that the socket has a long road ahead. "Danube" and "Nile" are the other two platforms that AMD will introduce in H1, both are notebook platforms, which bring to the table support for up to 4 cores, DDR3 memory, and DirectX 10.1 compliant integrated, or DirectX 11 compliant discrete graphics, to the table.
Battery life is one of the biggest selling points of a notebook platform. It does not pay to have a powerful processor that is also power-hungry. AMD intends to bring the power footprint of its notebook platforms down by at least 25 percent. Backed with WHQL signed GPGPU drivers, AMD has already shown keen interest in GPGPU standards, particularly open standards such as Microsoft DirectCompute and OpenCL. It will keep this interest alive by continuing to make more developer tools and hardware optimizations in this area.
Propagating DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks is another priority, though it is not likely to come in the form of integrated graphics, going by the roadmap slides. With energy-effecient GPUs already developed across top market segments, it will only be a matter of designing mobile graphics boards. For the enterprise market, AMD will introduce its first 12-core processors codenamed "Magny Cours", and 6000/4000 series platforms. This is when AMD's own server core-logic re-enters the server market under a completely new design team. The core-logic will compete with offerings from NVIDIA and Broadcom.
Finally the one point that caught our interest is the one that AMD highlighted in its slide. AMD's next-generation processor architecture codenamed "Bulldozer", will start sampling in 2010. It should tell us that development of the architecture may have already commenced. Bulldozer is an architecture designed from ground up, and ideally, it does not inherit the design from its eight-year old K8 turned K10(.5) architecture. The other big development is that of the processor codenamed "Bobcat" that integrates graphics processing onto the processor package. It is unlikely to be the first of its kind, as rival Intel has already sampled such processors. It is in this year that AMD will also sample its first 32 nm processors, although no market availability of such processors is indicated.
55 Comments on AMD to Sample Bulldozer Architecture in 2010, Sets Product Priorities
That's when I used to go home from clubs and then party on boats until 9 am or so <_<
seriously I'm sidetracking badly here. sorry bta :o
I still think that amd's chips are of better quality and live longer than anything else on the market but this seems to be their only selling point these days...:ohwell:
I love how everyone just writes AMD off like the bastard, red-headed, step-child because they don't hold the absolute top spot in the performance charts.
Yes, Intel makes the fastest chips. Yes the i7 architecture is far ahead of AMD (except for games). But the K10 series and current stock of AM3 processors are leaps and bounds above the old Phenoms. Your 9950 even OC'ed to 3.2 is still handicapped compared to the Phenom II's. AMD is doing what they can do, improve their products with the resources available to them. Intel's R&D budget is probably higher than AMD entire corporate finance budget.
IPC isn't much improved in Phenoms (K8L) over old Athlon64 they just get capability to crunch whole 128b SSE in one cycle and got ability to handle much larger pages (needed for server application where lies amd 95% design orientation since K8 introduction) and that's pretty much it. L3 came as quick solution for never developed unified L2 like Intel did in their Core 2 architecture and looking forward to what Intels Nehalems would look like all in one development and cutting r&d budget they never had. And as far as ipc improvement goes more of them was done by ViA in latest Isaiah iteration than AMD has done for it's ipc in the last three years well maybe even 4 after they implemented SSE3 in E3 Venice core :wtf:
Bulldozer came out from realK10 development which is scraped down somewhere in 2006 and K9 was scraped year or two earlier. So they in fact look what IBM want for their server needs and looking on Sun's Niagara with already some job done in K10. What they really did in K9/K10 was never disclosed. Maybe that memory unganging came from one of that devs. Anyway K10 since it's first glimpses should have been a wholly revamped architecture, as Bulldozer should be, with only virtual support for old x86. And Bulldozer has that x86 nativlly implemented? Anyway HT in bd should resemble MHT like in Niagara (hence all that river codenames in amds bulldozer based server cpus :D:D) not some QuasiSMT like Intel didi in past and latest Atom/Nealem iterations. Again feature needed for server market in architecture that should serve them for next 10 years??? As K7-K8-K8L redesign did.
HyperThreading Technology is abbreviated as HTT.
But what was i gonna ask is that on most places on the net we saw 2000MHz for HT3.0 (and 1000MHz for HT2.0 for the sake of reference) and adding to that as 4.0MT/s (and 2.0MT/s respectively). And thus gaining full bandwidth of 16GB/s (even in some official blogs. While most of more insight people use only 2.0MT/s x4bytes (2x 16bit lines) for HT3.0.
So i'd say i stand confused cause i know many of net advertisers use 2.0MT in HT2.0 just for the sake of marketing deliberately misleading people while it was just 1MT+1MT x16 bit or simply 1MT x2 x16bit and not in fact 2.0MT/s (reffering for HT2.0). So if you could clear out that misconceptions, especially in full XXGB/s bandwith in case of HT2.0 and now HT3.0.Could you been more thorough :rolleyes: and wash your hands before typing.
That seems to be their big draw back ATM.
And with ATI and all their work on OpenCL, why not?