Ecco finalmente la conferma ufficiale!
Come più volte ipotizzato sul thread del K10 il progetto
originale di Bulldozer prevedeva l'utilizzo dei
45nm SOI; l'uscita era prevista
per fine 2009 e doveva scontrarsi con le CPU Nehalem di Intel.
Durante lo sviluppo il progetto Bulldozer a 45nm
fu abbandonato e rivisto (aggiunta delle istruzioni AVX e abbandono delle SSE5) per i
32nm SOI.
AMD non specifica cosa andò storto e se il vecchio Bulldozer era uguale al nuovo come concetto architetturale, tuttavia nei mesi che seguirono su intrapresa la configurazione di tipo
MCM per le CPU Opteron a 8/12 core e l'utilizzo del
Low-k sulle CPU Six core Thuban destinate al mercato Desktop.
“How much resemblance does your today’s Bulldozer architecture have to the original design?” – Tye
As you are aware, when we initially designed “Bulldozer,” we were working with a more modular processor design. The original “Bulldozer” design was 45nm. But as development progressed, it became clear that the 45nm design that we had been working on was not going to be as competitive as we would have liked.
With the world watching your every move, all product decisions become very public (how many articles have you seen about “Bulldozer” in the press?) It is never an easy decision to make substantial changes to your product roadmap, but sometimes you have to make the tough call because it is the right thing to do. It helps when your partners are behind you and agree with the changes – sometimes a little short-term pain is necessary for a long-term gain.
We obviously aren’t going to get into specific design changes, but we think that the 32nm “Bulldozer” can bring a lot of benefit to our product due to smaller transistor size (which can help drive down the power envelope). By going for lower power, we hope to give you more room for compute cores, FP capabilities and more.
In addition, bringing the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processors to market allowed us to deliver an MCM design to market, which validated that technology. Having the SR5600 series chipsets, with more than a year under their belt, means that platform validation should be much easier for our partners. One of the biggest beneficiaries of a 32nm design is not necessarily a new technology added to the processor as much as it is the socket, chipset and platform work that happened ahead of the “Bulldozer” release.
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