AMD’s next generation of desktop and netbook CPUs

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AMD has revealed details of two new CPU architectures, both due to appear in the first half of 2011.

They are the company’s first new architectures since its manufacturing wing was split off to become Global Foundries, leaving AMD a “pure” design company.

The new “Bulldozer” architecture is aimed at desktops and servers. It’s AMD’s first 32nm processor, and the first to use the high-κ metal gate manufacturing process pioneered by Intel in 2007 to keep power consumption low at very small die sizes.

It’s also a first outing for AMD’s new answer to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology. Each Bulldozer core includes two complete integer units, along with a shared floating-point unit and shared L2 cache memory.

“Integer units are used for the most common compute tasks,” explained senior vice president Chekib Akrout. “I would even say more than 80% of compute tasks and applications use integer units. So it functions like a dual core design, but we don’t replicate everything. We’ve done significant research in analysing workloads to tune what needs to be shared.”

Bulldozer is expected to appear first in conventional CPU packages, then later as part of an “accelerated processing unit”, or “APU”, combining the CPU core and a GPU on a single die.

Bobcat pounces on Atom

AMD also revealed its answer to Intel’s Atom processors, a lightweight design dubbed “Bobcat”. Unlike Atom, Bobcat offers almost all the features of a desktop processor, including 64-bit operation, virtualisation and instruction set extensions up to SSE3.

It’s also designed with full support for out-of-order execution, something Intel’s Atom lacks.

“The machine is capable of ordering instructions in the most efficient way to get the maximum performance – as opposed to an in-order execution machine like Atom,” said Akrout, referring directly to the competition with unusual boldness. “Pure and simple, from the centre of this machine we do have a significant advantage against Atom.”

Despite its sophisticated design, Bobcat promises to draw less than 1W in operation, while offering 90% of the performance of AMD’s current mobile CPUs.

Volume production of Bobcat is set to ramp up at the end of 2010 for a launch early in 2011, as part of AMD’s first APU package. Codenamed “Ontario”, it is aimed at netbooks and lightweight notebooks.

“You can see that innovation remains alive and well,” declared Akrout, “in the context of a new and revitalised AMD, built around our focus as a design company.”

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