Tuesday, December 1, 2009

IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 01/12/2009


Elite Bastards
AMD core counts and Bulldozer

We've talked about AMD's next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed "Bulldozer", briefly in the past - However, one element of this architecture that hasn't really been discussed is the rather interesting way in which AMD are arranging cores and resources for Bulldozer-based CPUs.

Henceforth AMD is referring to the number of integer cores on a processor when it counts cores. So a quad-core Zambezi is made up of four integer cores, or two Bulldozer modules. An eight-core would be four Bulldozer modules.

It's a distinct shift from AMD's (and Intel's) current method of counting cores. A quad-core Phenom II X4 is literally four Phenom II cores on a single die, if you disabled three you would be left with a single core Phenom II. The same can't be said about a quad-core Bulldozer. The smallest functional block there is a module, which is two cores according to AMD.

Anandtech have the information in full.

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