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Advanced Micro Devices announced during Hot Chips conference that its next-generation code-named Bulldozer microprocessors will feature simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT) akin to Intel Corp.’s HyperThreading. AMD did not reveal many details about its SMT capability and only said that its Bulldozer processors would support it in 2011. Still, it is rather likely that AMD’s approach may be somewhat different compared to Intel’s HT and may even be of the same kind like Sun Microsystems’ simultaneous multi-threading feature than supports execution of four threads on one physical core.

Bulldozer is the next-generation micro-architecture and processor design developed from the ground up by AMD. In fact, Bulldozer will be the first major redesign of AMD’s processor architecture singe 2003, when the firm launched its Athlon 64/Opteron (K8) processors. It is expected that the next-generation micro-processors will offer considerably higher performance than current-generation chips. AMD Bulldozer CPUs will also feature SSE5 instruction set. The first desktop processor in the Bulldozer family is code-named Orochi and it has more than four cores, more than 8MB of cache and supports DDR3 memory. The Orochi chip will be made using 32nm process technology and is currently due in 2011. Server processors powered by Bulldozer micro-architecture are code-named Valencia and Interlagos. Those chips will have six to eight and twelve to sixteen processing engines.

Izvor: X-Bit Labs