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.
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