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Taken together, these goals explain just about every aspect of Bulldozer's design. The processor also had to be power efficient. In the words of Chief Architect Mike Butler, AMD's goal was to " hold the line" on IPC (presumably meaning to keep it at around the same level as in Phenom II) but to increase the clock speed, thereby achieving improved single-threaded performance, too. This belief underscores AMD's Fusion strategy: the integration of CPU cores and GPU cores into accelerated processing units (APUs) so that mathematical tasks can use the GPU cores.įor Bulldozer specifically, additional design influences came into play. Second, it believes that heavy floating point tasks shouldn't be done on the CPU at all. First, the company believes that workloads will become increasingly multithreaded processors should be optimized for multithreaded throughput-more concurrent threads-rather than single-threaded performance. The Bulldozer design has been influenced by AMD's long-term beliefs about the way processors should be built.
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Both K8, which added 64-bit and integrated the memory controller, and K10, which added single-chip quad core, more cache, and a host of changes to improve instructions per cycle (IPC), can trace their lineage back to the K7. The Bulldozer architecture is arguably AMD's first radically new architecture since the introduction of the K7 Athlons way back in 1999. The company lacks Intel's riches, so a failed architecture that it can't monetize and evolve over a period of many years could be fatal.ĪMD's fortunes may depend on whether Bulldozer is another K10-or whether it is AMD's Prescott.
![amd 785g amd k10 amd 785g amd k10](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-sempron-140/images/sempron_le140.jpg)
AMD's position is a whole lot more precarious. With the introduction of the Core 2 Duo line, Prescott was abandoned, and Intel has held the performance crown ever since. Intel, thanks to a combination of massive manufacturing capacity, deep pockets, and multiple design teams, could weather the storm. The problems Intel faced with scaling its Pentium 4 designs eventually gave the company no option but to abandon the architecture entirely. The lack of clock speed meant that the processor could never offset the penalties incurred by the long pipeline. However, it didn't boast consistent performance gains over Northwood, largely because it never achieved the clock speed targets it was intended to reach. Prescott was substantially modified from its predecessor, Northwood, with a much longer pipeline, larger cache, and new instructions. The K10 architecture used in both Phenom and Phenom II was essentially sound AMD just had to work out some relatively minor problems before it could achieve its potential.Ĭontrast this with Intel's Prescott Pentium 4s. In late 2008, Phenom II was introduced, boasting substantial improvements in clock speed and a much larger level 3 cache. This bug was fixed partway through Phenom's life, adding another 10 percent to the processor's performance. A BIOS fix to work around the bug and correct the processor's behavior was released, but it exacted a severe performance penalty. The biggest single issue was that the cache used for supporting virtual memory was buggy (a problem known as "the TLB bug"). With Phenom, the problems were fortunately not fundamental. And its ability to do that will be governed by the Bulldozer architecture: is it fundamentally flawed, or are the performance issues merely teething trouble? The launch of the Phenom in 2007 was similarly underwhelming-it arrived late, broken, and slow-but AMD managed to turn things around with Phenom II to produce a viable competitor to many of Intel's processors.ĪMD's future success will depend on the company's ability to make lemonade from the Bulldozer lemons. Indeed, in some tests, Bulldozer can't even keep up with its predecessor. One thing is clear: this won't kill Intel's Sandy Bridge, as some were hoping. AMD's long-awaited Bulldozer processor finally hit the market this week, and the Web has been flooded with benchmark results.