Items tagged with Bulldozer
AMD just released some details regarding its upcoming seventh generation of A-Series and FX APUs, formerly codenamed Bristol Ridge. Bristol Ridge is essentially a refresh of the previous generation Carrizo design and uses the same 28nm process. In lieu of a die shrink, however, AMD has made improvements to the manufacturing process, tweaked the transistor mix, and enabled new features that were previously dormant in Carrizo, and the end result is higher frequencies at a given power level, in addition to some IPC (instructions per clock) improvements. The newly activated features within Bristol Ridge include adaptive voltage frequency scaling, among other undisclosed features.AMD...
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When Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced its Bulldozer architecture, it talked about the design being a "third-way" approach between symmetric multithreading (SMT), like Intel's Hyper Threading, and true multi-core processing where multiple discrete cores reside on a single die. Now AMD will have to defend its design and the way it was marketed because of a class-action lawsuit.The lawsuit, filed by Tom Dickey in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, alleges that AMD deceived customers by overstating the number of cores on its Bulldozer processors. With regards to Bulldozer-based processors sold and marketed as 8-core chips, Dickey and the lawsuit...
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Ever since AMD announced it would build an ARM processor, there've been questions about how the company would balance its x86 and ARM obligations and product lines. Today, the company gave a major update to how it sees the future of these products. This year, AMD will debut its first Cortex-A57 based server (codenamed Seattle). In 2015, AMD will launch a 20nm SoC family around the new Puma+ core and a second-gen Cortex-A57 chip -- and those two CPUs will be drop-in compatible with each other (codenamed Project Skybridge). In 2016, AMD will follow up with its own custom ARM architecture implementation. One of the major changes coming next year is that both the ARM and x86 chips will apparently...
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The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that the chip won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. This was always surprising, but AMD adamantly stuck to the published roadmap and the Q4 2013 availability. Or at least, they did. What the company is saying now, in the wake of a rather confused DigiTimes story (more on that in a moment) is that while Kaveri will ship to customers (read: OEMs) in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. Whether...
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There have been a number of spec leaks around the PS4 and Xbox 720 in the last few days, including updated information on what the latest dev kits from Sony contain. We'll cover these first, courtesy of Kotaku and then offer our own analysis, HotHardware style. According to Kotaku, the latest dev kits for Sony's PS4 contain: 8GB of video RAM 2.2GB of GPU memory 4x "Dual-Core Bulldozers" (this is nonsensical as written but presumably refers to BD's "dual-module" design) GPU: AMD R10xx (aka GCN, aka the Radeon HD 7000 family) EuroGamer, meanwhile, says that the new device is built around an eight-core "Jaguar" CPU married to a cutdown variant of the 7970M. That makes sense as far as floating point...
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AMD's new Piledriver-based Opterons are launching today, completing a product refresh that the company began last spring with its Trinity APUs. The new 12 & 16-core Piledriver parts are debuting as the Opteron 6300 series. Originally, AMD had planned to add still more cores with this refresh and had anticipated a line of 10 and 20-core products. The company scrapped this plan last year, stating instead that Piledriver was enough of an improvement that they saw no need to widen existing parts still further. Now that the next generation of Opteron CPUs is here, what can we expect? In SPECjbb2005, at least, significant performance gains. This graph isn't as informative as we'd like; SPECpower_ssj2008...
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Nvidia has finished work on a new supercomputer at Oak Ridge that showcases the company's K20 Tesla GPUs. The new cluster, dubbed Titan, is expected to break the 20 petaflop barrier. The system is a major upgrade to the Jaguar supercomputer that proceeded it (Jaguar was prominently upgraded last year to AMD's new Bulldozer CPUs after utilizing Magny-Cours products. The net effect of the upgrade has boosted Titan's raw computing power tenfold, while occupying the same floor space as the previous Jaguar system. The supercomputer now contains 18,688 nodes (299,008 CPU cores), with each node built around the AMD Opteron 6274 and Tesla K20. "One challenge in supercomputers today...
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Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) starts on Tuesday, and the chip manufacturer is expected to discuss its Ivy Bridge refresh, Haswell, talk about its upcoming 32nm tablet platform, Clover Trail, and possibly share a few details on its 22nm Atom SOC's. Performance per watt is going to be a major focus at IDF this year; Haswell is rumored to be capable of idling below 10W. Intel always uses IDF as a demonstration platform and roadmap update, but it's particularly important this year, when competing foundries have struggled with 28nm and Intel itself just cut its Q3 guidance. Several of Intel's rivals are gearing up their own demonstrations for this week. In AMD's case, that's normal -- Sunnyvale almost...
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Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off AMD's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of Sunnyvale's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part. Bulldozer, launched just over a year ago, was a major disappointment. The company's second-generation Bulldozer implementation, codenamed Piledriver, made a number of important changes and was incorporated into the Trinity APU family that debuted last spring. Steamroller is the first refresh of Bulldozer's underlying architecture and may finally deliver the sort of performance and efficiency AMD was aiming for when it built 'Dozer in the first place. In the...
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After more than six months of high-to-mid profile executive departures, AMD has major news to announce on its new executive hire -- and he's a welcome addition. Starting today, Jim Keller will serve as a vice president and the company's Chief Architect for CPU Cores. Keller has spent more than thirty years in the semiconductor business, including a few at AMD. When AMD brought members of DEC's Alpha team aboard in the late 1990s, Keller was one of the CPU architects that came along. Having worked on Alpha's EV5, Jim was lead architect on the first K8 project (the first iteration of K8 was eventually canceled and Fred Weber became lead architect on the design that came to market). Keller moved...
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At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) today, Steve Ballmer formally announced the launch date for Windows 8 -- the OS will be RTM'd (Released To Manufacturing) the first week of August, with an estimated ship date in October. Microsoft's own ARM-flavored Windows 8 Surface will supposedly go on sale "around" that time frame; the company mostly showed off demo units and ultrabooks from the likes of HP, Lenovo, and Acer. Microsoft is forecasting a sales target of 375 million new Windows devices in the next twelve months and took paints at the conference to tell everyone that Surface -- the company's own tablet/ultrabook hybrid -- will only account for a "few million" of those devices....
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Rumor around the 'Net is that AMD's Bulldozer follow-up, codenamed Vishera, could drop in early Q4 this year. The new AMD 8350, as its known, will supposedly be a four-module/eight-core design clocked at 4GHz (4.2GHz Turbo Mode) with a 125W TDP. Vishera could potentially deliver what last year's Bulldozer didn't; AMD's latest CPU was widely panned for failing to meet most of its performance, clockspeed, and power consumption targets. Given that Vishera is based on the already-launched Trinity core, we can make a few predictions concerning the chip's performance -- and whether it can measure up. Definitely Maybe AMD's Trinity AMD's Trinity incorporated two technologies that substantially reduced...
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AMD's CEO, Rory Read, has made no secret of his plans to take the company in new and different directions, but the company's server announcement today caught the market by surprise. Sunnyvale has purchased SeaMicro in a deal worth ~$330 million, the majority of which ($281M) will be paid in cash. The acquisition brings AMD's onetime CTO, Fred Weber, at least temporarily back to the fold; Weber left AMD to take a position with SeaMicro. If you aren't familiar with the company, SeaMicro is a server startup that made a name for itself starting several years ago when it built server rigs using Atom processors. The company has extended and built on that foundation since its inception and ironically...
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Ever since Bulldozer's less-than-spectacular debut, enthusiasts and investors have watched to see if the company would follow up with faster chips that improved overall performance. That's finally started to happen; AMD announced two new chips today -- the quad-core FX-4170 with a 4.2GHz base clock speed / 4.3GHz Turbo mode, and the six-core FX-6200 at 3.8GHz stock / 4.1GHz Turbo. Both of the new parts are clocked ~15% faster than the FX-4100 and FX-6100 and may offer a slightly faster integrated memory controller as well; rumors indicate that the IMC is clocked at 2.2GHz, up from 2GHz. The new chips are reportedly based on the B3 stepping that's been in the works for months; current Bulldozer...
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