Published in PC Hardware

More Bulldozer specs surface

by on14 March 2011


Looking good
AMD’s upcoming Bulldozer architecture is still a few months away, but more and more information is slowly starting to surface and paint the full picture.

Bulldozer should be able to fight Intel’s Core i7 series and from the looks of it the new core will give Intel a run for its money. According to Xbit Labs, Bulldozer will perform on a par with Core i7 2600 chips and the desktop Zambezi iteration will proudly bear the FX moniker.

The FX-4xxx designation is reserved for quad-cores, while six- and eight-cores will be dubbed FX-6xxx and FX-8xxx series respectively. Bulldozer is AMD’s first entirely new architecture in nearly eight years and it will feature quite a few clever ideas.

Bulldozer features a modular design and each module is comprised of two independent integer cores that will share fetch, decode and L2 functionality. Eight-cores will get 8MB of cache, while six- and quad-cores feature 6MB and 4MB respectively. However, the chip will still feature up to 8MB of shared L3 cache and an all-new memory controller, capable of supporting DDR3 up to 1866MHz.

Bulldozer will pack HyperTransport 3.1 and the new chips will use the AM3+ socket, hence they won’t be compatible with existing motherboards, which is hardly a surprise. AMD is scheduled to roll out 900-series chipsets sometime in Q2. The word on the street is that chipset development has ran into some minor setbacks, but there is a very good chance Bulldozer will be on schedule and we might see actual products at Computex.

More here.

 

Rate this item
(51 votes)

Read more about: