AMD Talks Upcoming "Fusion" Processor, Roadmaps

[Heinz68]

For me the most interesting part was about the Hemlock coming shortly. :thumbsup:

For me, the most interesting part of AMD's Analyst Day this morning was the discussion of the next generation of Fusion processors.

Rick Bergman, Senior Vice president and general manager for the company's product group, said the upcoming Fusion processor, which will have both CPU and GPU features on a single die, will have about 1 billion transistors on a single 32nm processor. For comparison, he said that the current Phenom II uses 758 million transistors on a 45nm process; while the 5000 series GPU has 2.15 billion transistors on a 40nm processor.

The first Fusion processor, which will be known as Llano, is due out in 2011 and will include support for Direct X 11; it will be known as an "accelerated processing unit," or APU. The company is working on new processor cores known as "Bulldozer" for the high-end and on "Bobcat" for the low end.

Read much more about the roadmap at PCMag.com (http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2009/11/amd_talks_upcoming_fusion_proc.php)

[Shamrock]

Here's some more about Bobcat and Bulldozer. The link has the pics and diagrams.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3674

This is a single Bulldozer core, but notice that it has two independent integer clusters, each with its own L1 data cache. The single FP cluster shares the L1 cache of the two integer clusters.

Within each integer “core” are four pipelines, presumably half for ALUs and half for memory ops. That’s a narrower width than a single Phenom II core, but there are two integer clusters on a single Bulldozer core.

Bulldozer will also support AVX, hinted at by the two 128-bit FMAC units behind the FP scheduler. AMD is keeping the three level cache hierarchy of the current Phenom II architecture.

A single Bulldozer core will appear to the OS as two cores, just like a Hyper Threaded Core i7. The difference is that AMD is duplicating more hardware in enabling per-core multithreading. The integer resources are all doubled, including the schedulers and d-caches. It’s only the FP resources that are shared between the threads. The benefit is you get much better multithreaded integer performance, the downside is a larger core.

Doubling the integer resources but not the FP resources works even better when you look at AMD’s whole motivation behind Fusion. Much heavy FP work is expected to be moved to the GPU anyway, there’s little sense in duplicating FP hardware on the Bulldozer core when it has a fully capable GPU sitting on the same piece of silicon. Presumably the Bulldozer cores and the GPU will share the L3 cache. It’s really a very elegant design and the basis for what AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have been talking about for years now. The CPU will do what it does best while the GPU does what it is good at

[Shamrock]

Double post

[Viral]

Sounds very promising to me, I was wondering if they were going to just design a standard CPU or specifically taylor one strong at integer and weak as FP as to compliment the GPU. Looks like Bulldozer might actually be a very strong contender in 2011 :)