No sooner had we begun to draft up this story, did AMD remove evidence from its BIOS and Kernel Developer’s Guide, strongly suggesting that a B3 stepping for Bulldozer was already in development.
Current Bulldozer releases are of B2 stepping. A stepping in this instance usually includes minor adjustments such as bug fixes and manufacturing tweaks to improve performance and/or yield. Stepping is a typical practice that all chip-makers follow.
You may remember the notorious TLB bug that was fixed with a stepping update in the original AMD Phenom processors in 2008. The bug caused data corruption under extreme circumstances and it was not safe, in terms of data integrity, to operate the Phenom without a BIOS issued fix, which greatly hampered performance.
Given recent benchmarks, we’d like to think that the Bulldozer is suffering from an equally devastating ailment that can be fixed with a simple stepping update; in reality this is very much likely not to be the case, a small increment from 2 to 3 as opposed to 'B' to 'C' indicates only minor changes, though it may be possible to hope for slight improvements in areas such as power consumption, memory-timing efficiency or the typical overclocking threshold.
At this stage whether a B3 stepping would bring with it any performance improvements is pure conjecture, however popular opinion suggests that the upcoming FX-8170 CPU, due to be released in Q1 2012, will be of B3 stepping and is likely to be clocked at 3.9GHz; and so we may not have too long to find out.
Will a B3 stepping simply enable AMD to produce acceptable numbers of 3.9GHz CPUs, or will it bring with it other performance enhancements? Let us know your thoughts.
