The Hot Chips conference has been running over the past few days in California and AMD has taken the opportunity to release some more details on its upcoming CPUs. The highly-anticipated ‘Bobcat' and ‘Bulldozer' architectures are set to launch over the next year or so and according to the manufacturer will make quite a splash when they arrive.
Bobcat
Bobcat is the notebook and ultrathin CPU that will be released as a part of the Ontario APU towards the start of next year. The focus for AMD is to achieve performance at around 90 per cent of today's mainstream mobile CPUs while dropping the power-draw to an absolute minimum. According to the company's plans, this will mean a core capable of operating at under 1W when idle.
On top of this, AMD has managed to shrink the package down to less than half of the area of current mobile CPUs. This, along with new power-saving features, should mean that heat and power-draw are decreased across the board.
Bulldozer
At the other end of the market are the Bulldozer chips, which will find their way into servers and high-end PCs. Not only will they be manufactured on a new 32nm process but the CPUs will be the first of AMD's chips to include support for multiple simultaneous threads. By using a design that combines discrete and shared components, the company hopes to create a chip that increases performance without having redundant and underutilised parts of the core.
The end result will be smaller, lower-power cores that don't sacrifice performance. Multiple Bulldozer cores can then be combined, giving AMD an architecture that can be scaled for use in mid-range desktops as well as for the high-end and server markets.
The company is also promising a 50 per cent performance increase from a 33 per cent increase in physical cores from the new design.
AMD seems to be very excited about the architectures that will be used in its upcoming CPUs, and if its claims are accurate, it might be justified. We will be able to find out for sure once both processor families are released next year, with the first Bobcat chips due to arrive in laptops in the first months of 2011.
