AMD cuts to the core with 'Bulldozer' Opterons

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AMD cuts to the core with 'Bulldozer' Opterons

The future is modular

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

The pressure to compete now and in the future is high, and the competition between AMD and Intel is intense. The etching on the six-core "Istanbul" Opteron 2400 and 8400 processors, launched in June, is barely dry, and they have barely ramped to volume among the server makers. But in September, AMD talked up its future homegrown chipsets, and in November, it trumpeted the next-generation of Opteron processors, the "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100s for two-socket and four-socket servers and the "Lisbon" Opteron 4100s for uniprocessor and two-socket boxes.

AMD basically took a cookie cutter approach to adding cores to the die, plunking multiple and identical cores, complete with all the circuits they would need if they were the only processor in a system. With the Bulldozer cores (which are not called the K9 generation, by the way, perhaps because AMD does not want any chip to be affiliated with a dog), AMD is being a little more clever.

Instead of having a core as the basic building block, the Bulldozer core is implemented as what AMD is calling a module.

Read more plus screenshots – The Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/14/amd_bulldozer_preview/