AMD exposes Bulldozer and Bobcat cores

Attempts to better Hyper-Threading

Next we come to Bobcat, which is a completely different design again. After watching Intel's Atom CPU hoover up business in the netbook market, AMD has now engineered a module specifically for netbooks and thin and light laptops. 

You don't get the two integer units as you do in Bulldozer; instead you get a pretty serious floating point unit and a single integer unit. In this case, the integer block has its own allocation of Level 1 data cache, but the Level 1 instruction cache is shared with the floating point unit. A pool of Level 2 cache is also shared between the two blocks. 

Perhaps more interestingly, though, Bobcat is able to perform out-of order execution, much like VIA's Nano CPU, meaning it can rearrange instructions to maximise performance. This usually comes at a cost of die space, which is why Intel decided to revert to in-order execution with its Atom CPUs. As such, this could potentially make Bobcat a much quicker mobile core than Atom.

Of course, it can only do this if it gets the power consumption down as well, but AMD claims that a Bobcat core can happily run while consuming less than a single Watt. In addition to out-of order execution, AMD also says that the 64-bit Bobcat core features an advanced branch predictor, a high-performance floating point unit and support for SSE 3.

As with Bulldozer, Bobcat is just one component of a new Fusion CPU, and AMD provided a snapshot of its forthcoming Ontario package to show where it fits in. Along with the CPU cores, an Ontario CPU also features a 'dedicated SIMD array' (GPU), a unified video decoder and an integrated memory controller.

It's also worth noting that not all Fusion CPUs will be based on the new processor cores. AMD points out that while its forthcoming Llano chips will feature an integrated DirectX 11 GPU, the CPU cores themselves will be based on the company's older K8 architecture.

AMD says both new cores will be released in 2011.