At SemiAccurate is a brief look at the architecture of Bulldozer, the long awaited successor to the Phenom II chip.  We are still languishing under several NDA’s which cover the actual performance of the chip, so you can only see the floor plans … for now.  Even that is enough to raise some questions about what AMD has done and what a CPU core is now.  At each corner of the chip you can see a Bulldozer Core which adds to four, only half of what we were lead to expect on Bulldozer.  That is because each Bulldozer Core is comprised of two CPU cores, so thoroughly fused that they are essentially one core and this will lead to great confusion as to what a CPU core actually is now.  Thankfully this is not an APU so we do not have to include integrated graphics in the count of cores on the die.  Read the full article to learn more about what has been done to the fetch and predict branches as well as the FP scheduler.

"During the always excellent Hot Chips conference this year, AMD’s Sean White gave a talk about the architecture, and only the architecture, of the new CPU. To say it is different is understating things, it is really a bold step into places where few have gone, and no one has tried on a consumer product. The closest thing to AMD’s new Bulldozer architecture out there is Sun’s Niagara, and no one would accuse those designers of following the pack."

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