ITE221 - Fall 2011 - Chapter 4

Website: http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/chips/285876-coming-this-fall-amd-s-bulldozer-vs-new-versions-of-intel-s-sandy-bridge#fbid=pAVsMrRsll6
(edited due to incorrect link)

For Chapter 4’s website review, I look at an article from PCMag.com’s ‘Forward Thinking’ column, by Michael J. Miller. In his article dated August 4, 2011, Mr. Miller compares upcoming processors from Intel (code named ‘Sandy Bridge-E’, and marketed under the Core i3, i5, and i7 names) and AMD (using that company’s new ‘Bulldozer’ technology). He briefly examines the architecture of AMD’s Bulldozer CPUs, which are built on modules which each contain two integer cores and a single floating point core, plus a shared instruction cache and fetch and decode logic. The first implementations of this architecture are planned to use 4 modules (so 8 integer/4 floating-point cores per CPU), as compared to Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E chips which have 6 or 8 cores, each of which has both an integer and a floating-point core and is “hyperthreaded” (able to handle two processing threads at once). AMD reportedly hopes to use this new technology to pursue gains in midrange desktop units, leaving the high-end desktop system market to Intel (a position AMD has taken for several years now), and also to capture some of the server market, where Intel has shown massive dominance. Mr. Miller expresses interest in seeing how the actual chips in question perform respective to each other, once they reach market (the Bulldozer chips have just recently been released, while the newest Sandy Bridge-E chips are not yet on the market).