AMD's 2010/2011 Roadmap from the IT Professional’s Perspective

• Two integer clusters share fetch and decode logic but have their own dedicated Instruction and Data cache

• Integer clusters can not be shared between threads: integer cores act like a Chip Multi Processing (CMP) CPU.

• The extra integer core (schedulers, D-cache and pipelines) adds only 5% die space

• L1-caches are similar to Barcelona/Shanghai (64 KB 2-way? Not confirmed)

• Up to 4 modules share a L3-cache and Northbridge

• Two times 4 Bulldozer modules (2 x 8 "cores" or 16 cores) are about 60 to 80% faster than the twelve core Opteron 6100 CPU in SPECInt_rate.

With Bulldozer, AMD finally seems to have designed an aggressive integer core. Since the introduction of the Intel Woodcrest in 2006, Intel’s CPUs have been offering superior integer crunching performance per core. Since integer performance determines the performance of 90-95% of the server application out there, this is a big deal.