The Ex-Alpha engineering teams lead by Dirk Meyer that created K7 and K8 architecture messed everything up with Barcelona/Agena and the infamous TLB-bug [Translation-Lookaside Buffer]. Shanghai/Deneb cleaned a lot of things up and AMD is back being competitive again, but Intel is pushing hard: Intel is operating in tick-tock architectural mode, and so far - AMD isn't able to answer back. K10 and K10.5 were nothing else but improvements over the K8 architecture. Last time we saw a completely new architecture from AMD, the stock market thought that an online dog-food shop was worth half a billion US$, mainstream media was touting that the world is going to end with that horrible Y2K bug... Yes, quite a long time ago. But before we dig into Bulldozer's architecture, let's set the record clear, with a simple architectural comparison between AMD and Intel.You can read it over here.
Early look at AMD's Bulldozer processor
Posted on Saturday, April 18 2009 @ 11:06 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck