Everything's modular
But despite its rather forceful sounding name, Fruehe says Bulldozer's modules will go easy on users, who will not even have to come in contact with them. To explain, he says that if booting up an 'Interlagos' system, for example, the hardware will see 16 integer cores and not eight modules. Applications too will see only the 16 cores.
Fruehe boasts that Bulldozer architecture can provide up to 80 per cent more throughput when running two threads simultaneously compared to a single thread running on a single integer core.
"Our engineers estimate that the amount of discrete circuitry that is added to each Bulldozer module in order to allow for a second integer thread to run only adds ~12 per cent additional circuitry to each module, which translates into only ~five per cent of circuitry to the total Bulldozer die," he adds.
And, says Fruehe, "just as multiple Bulldozer modules can be integrated into the die, because they are modular, in the future other modules, such as GPUs, could be integrated into the architecture."
All in all, AMD is certainly sounding upbeat. "We feel pretty confident about how our offerings stack up in 2010 and beyond," concludes Fruehe.
