14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's launch of the high-performance Bulldozer architecture is one of the most eagerly awaited events of the year, so many will be happy to know that the Sunnyvale-based company says everything is on track for the server edition of Bulldozer to be available in the third quarter of 2011.
Together with a presentation detailing the availability of its new eight-core and 12-core processors, based on the Magny-Cours architecture, AMD also released a slide meant to reassure everyone that server Bulldozer will launch in Q3 2011, just as previously announced.
Bulldozer is AMD's next-generation high-performance CPU architecture that was designed from the ground up in order to eliminate some of the redundancies that come with traditional multi-core designs.
As a result, the chip uses a modular construction, each module being comprised of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each, and as much as 2048KB of L2 cache.
Just like the 8MB of L3 cache, the Level 2 memory will also be shared between the modules.
All the chips will support AMD's Turbo Core technology, offer native DDR3-1866 memory support, and one or more Hyper Transport 3.1 links, while Opteron CPUs will also pack a quad-channel memory controller.
According to the number of cores available, the server processors will be split into two families, Valencia and Interlagos, the first packing an octo-core design while the latter features 16 processing cores.
Of the two, only Interlagos will be compatible with the G34 sockets used for the Magny-Cours CPUs, Valencia using the new C32 socket, as we previously reported.
AMD's schedule for the two processor families calls for a Q2 2011 tapeout, mass production being scheduled for the same quarter while widespread availability is expected for Q3 2011. (via ComputerBase.de)
