AMD details new Bobcat and Bulldozer core designs

AMD  has announced details of two of its upcoming core designs dubbed Bobcat and Bulldozer.

Highlights of the new cores were detailed today. Bulldozer will offer a new and innovative approach to multithreaded compute performance with a balance of dedicated and shared resources. The design also has a high core count that is scalable. Bulldozer will also offer new x86 instruction support for SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, and XOP including 4-operand FMAC. Other features include 32nm process technology and advanced power management features.

AMD is also working on a multi-threading technology of its own to rival Intel's HyperThreading, that exploits Bulldozer's branched integer processing backed by shared floating point design, which AMD believes to be so efficient, that each SMT worker thread can be deemed a core in its own merit, and further be backed by competing threads per "core".

AMDs answer to a lot of Intel's processors in the low-power category, be it the Core i3/i5 "Clarkdale", Core CULV, or even the Atom, seems to have finally taken shape with "Bobcat".

Bobcat will offer less than one-watt capable operation and out-of-order instruction execution for higher performance. AMD estimates that Bobcat will be able to provide 90% of today