AMD has been staunchly committed to the Bulldozer architecture for a few years now. The company debuted the architecture back in 2011 and followed up with ‘Piledriver’ within a year. Now, AMD’s CTO has unveiled the third-generation Bulldozer core, called ‘Steamroller.’
When AMD introduced ‘Piledriver’ as a follow-up to its Bulldozer architecture this year, the release surely impressed many. Piledriver formed the basis of AMD’s Trinity APU and is set to furnish the graphical processing of computers on its own in the coming days.
Within some time of Piledriver’s launch, AMD was able to tweak the core to take down its net power consumption. The overall power usage of the core went down by up to 20%, without affecting its performance. Other major improvements that were a part of Piledriver included prefetching, branch prediction and better scheduling efficiency.
Now, AMD’s Bulldozer architecture is back in the news with the latest in the series, Steamroller. AMD’s CTO recently hinted about the specs of the upcoming core at a conference. And we are rest assured that Steamroller will be a significant step ahead of Piledriver, once it arrives.
Streamroller tackles the problem of share fetch and decode hardware. Each core can run its own parallel decoders which significantly overhauls the performance of the core. However, this does bump the power consumption too.
The overall area of the core has also been trimmed down by AMD, thanks to some shared hardware between MMX unit and 128-bit FMAC pipes. It also lets the core become more power-efficient overall.
In all, Steamroller is surely a beauty of a chip and we are eagerly waiting for AMD to release more details about the core, especially the release date.
Thanks To: Extreme Tech
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