Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Yesterday, we
chided AMD for its decision not to reveal more details about Bulldozer and Bobcat, but it turns out we didn't have all the facts.
AMD was planning on disclosing more information later in the day at Hot Chips—but the company failed to disclose that before we went live with our previous coverage. We're going to take a look at the new information about Bobcat and Bulldozer that's subsequently been revealed; if you want more general background data, check the links above.
AMD claims that Bobcat can "directly map 89 percent of x86 instructions to a single micro-Op, an additional 10 percent to a pair of micro-ops, and more complicated x86 instructions (<1%) are micro-coded." Intel quoted very similar figures when it unveiled Atom's decoder, but there's likely to be some subtle differences in the capabilities of the two cores.
