AMD announced that it would shed some light on its upcoming Bulldozer and Bobcat architectures at the Hot Chips conference hosted at Stanford University. Sadly, the event is scheduled for August, so there's not much to go on just yet.

Hot Chips co-chair professor Jose Renau claims that the new cores will mark a radical architectural change for AMD.

"Since AMD has been in trouble these could be do-or-die chips for them," said Renau. "In the same way the move from the AMD K5 to the K6 was a big change, so the move from the Opteron to the Bulldozer is a huge change."

Although we don't share Renau's assesment that AMD is in so much trouble that its future depends on Bulldozer and Bobcat, a successful new architecture could make AMD more competitive in the high end market, which has been dominated by Intel since the K8 days.

In addition to AMD, several other players will show off new architectures and designs at the conference. ARM will reveal new instruction sets and its plans for server oriented chips. Microsoft will detail an upcoming SoC that is supposedly three times more powerful than chips used in the Xbox 360 and it will apparently rely on an AMD graphics core. The Chinese Academy of Sciences will also proudly present the Godson 3c, a 16-core processor in 32nm. Quite impressive, as the previous version was a quad core in 65nm.

More here.