AMD's Bulldozer Opteron Arriving Sept. 26

Bulldozer-based Opterons will emerge on September 26. The Opteron 4200 series will feature processors with either six or eight Bulldozer coresor going by the modular design of those chips, either three or four two-core modules. Interlagos, then, becomes the new powerhouse in AMD's server lineup.

The upcoming Opteron 6200 series will have chips with 12 and 16 Bulldozer cores. Valencia is the next stage in AMD's Opteron 4000 series aimed at single-socket and dual-socket, cost-optimized, energy efficient servers. It will be succeeded in 2012 by a CPU codenamed Sepang that has up to ten Bulldozer cores.

At AMD's analyst day last November, the company described its next-generation Bulldozer core as the biggest change in x86 servers in a decade. The new processor cores offer up to 50 percent more throughput as AMD's current 12-core Opterons while sitting in the same power envelope, according to AMD, while a redesigned memory controller serves up a 30 percent boost to memory performance and a flexible 256-bit floating point unit.

AMD's 32-nanometer Bulldozer two-core modules share some components across the two cores, namely fetch and decode units, L2 memory cache, and a floating point scheduler, but each core in a module has its own L1 cache and integer unit scheduler. Each core has just one thread but by sharing some resources with another core, those threads come less expensively than they would if each Bulldozer core was an entirely stand-alone unit.