AMD reveals more details on Bobcat, Bulldozer cores

Fabless chip company AMD has disclosed more details of its up and coming cores, codenamed Bulldozer and Bobcat.

Bobcat will be the core AMD uses when it releases its first Fusion chip, codenamed Ontario, in early 2011.

The other Fusion chip, Llano, will use a K8 related core.

AMD in a briefing for journalists, said that Bulldozer is the "heavy lifter" aimed at server and high end desktops, while Bobcat is aimed at the netbook and notebook market.
Bulldozer pairs two integer execution cores with components that can be shared, while there are instruction set extensions. A single core is usually used for hyperthreading. Bulldozer includes better power management. It will be built on 32 nanometre process technology. This will be the first processor to use high gate k metal. SMT forces two threads into one core, with threads competing for resources.  Core multiprocessing (CMP) has dedicated cores for each thread.

Bulldozer's separate CPU integer act as two "strong threads". Sharing resources dynamically switches between shared and dedicated components. The FP operations are shared between the two integer units. On an eight core Bulldozer chp the L3 cache is shared with divisions transparent to hardware, OS and applications. 

Bobcat is an efficient low power X86 core, aimed at the netbook and notebook market. It is a sub one watt capable core, with an out of order execution engine, uses SE1-3 and virtualisation. AMD claims it will deliver 90 perfence in less than half of the silicon area.

Bobcat will be the CPU element of Ontario Fusion, using a high speed bus architecture and a shared low latency memory model, and will appear early next year, ahead of schedule.