AMD Bulldozer, M-Space, Bobcat and Falcon Fusion

Besides 4-way CrossFire AMD also talked about lots of other things today at its analyst day.

Bulldozer
The most important thing that AMD presented today is the Bulldozer CPU core. This chip is presented as the highest performing single and multi-threaded compute core in history. It will we targeted at servers and desktop systems and will feature a dramatic increase in performance per watt.

We will see Bulldozer in enterprise servers as well as on our own desktops. The statements that most needs to be focused on are, “Continued Scaling for single-thread performance,” and “Partitioned for future scalability and modularity.” That would tell me that Bulldozer could be morphed according to the importance of the application whether it has specific multi-thread needs or single thread needs and still take advantage of all its resources. Currently using our dual and quad core processors, when we have a resource-hungry single threaded application, which is still usually the case, our other core(s) are sitting there doing nothing. Bulldozer seems to be able to unite its core to work together on a single threaded application. As for the “partitioned” statement I would have to read into that the heart of Bulldozer is somewhat akin to AMD’s M-SPACE design methodology in that it could be very possibly for AMD to build Bulldozer cores designed for specific applications and hardware.

I think it is worth making the point that Bulldozer is a radical departure from the current AMD cores and even the Barcelona cores which are yet to hit the marketplace . Bulldozer will be the first “clean break” we have seen from AMD’s K8 core. Bulldozer is easily the most promising architecture we have seen from AMD since its Opteron launch in April of 2003.

The AMD Bulldozer is expected in mid to late 2009 and will use DDR3 memory.

M-Space
A new modular and scalable design. You can think of this is AMD taking it technologies and portioning them in building blocks that can be custom designed for specific applications. Mainly for mobile and set top box markets.

Bobcat
CPU core with maximum energy efficiency and uncompromosing performance for next-gen mobility. Should scale as low as 1W.

Falcon Fusion
AMD's first step towards a fused product. Will be optimized for mobile and mainstream desktops.

More details and slides at HardOCP.