Ploughing ahead
Sliding down towards the bottom part of the volume market, Fruehe says AMD is keeping it cheap and cheerful for smaller firms with the Opteron 4000 series. "We don't believe you should be penalised because of your size," said Fruehe, explaining that the 4000 series may be cheap, but still packed a powerful punch on low power.
Looking ahead to 2011, the year when AMD is widely expected to get back in the innovation game, Fruehe waxes lyrical about the firm's upcoming 'Bulldozer' core, which he says will be renamed at launch.
The core will reportedly be "drop-in compatible" with both the Opteron 6000 and 4000 series platforms, meaning an upgrade should be rather painless.
Declaring that the "days of the single threaded application are nearing an end," Fruehe says Bulldozer is designed for a future loaded with concurrent applications, for all your business' multitasking needs.
Going over the architecture, Fruehe reminds us that Bulldozer is based on a modular architecture, with two integer cores paired up with an extra-large FPU to make the Bulldozer module itself.
Fruehe goes on to say that Bulldozer modules "are the basis of all of the designs that will be coming from this architecture," with the modular nature allowing AMD to build processors with a variety of core counts (like the eight-core Valencia and the 16-core Interlagos, for instance).
