You can’t say that AMD is ever boring. The company says its next-generation Bulldozer CPU core will take a unique approach to computing that goes beyond Hyper-Threading, which some believe could offer phenomenal performance.
Bulldozer makes a fairly big break from how today’s multicores are constructed. Today’s dual-, quad-, and hexa-cores are based on single-cores strung together. They can share L2 or L3 cache, but generally are partitioned off from each other. With Bulldozer, the basic building block of a multi-core chip changes from a walled off single core to more of a duplex. Two cores are tightly intertwined and share fetch, decode, floating-point scheduler, and dual 128-bit fused-multiply-accumulate units, or FPUs. AMD says each module includes dedicated integer schedulers, pipelines, and L1 cache.
This, AMD says, is far superior to Intel’s Hyper-Threading, which can bog down when the same resources are under load.
