AMD Bulldozer production to begin April 2011

Ah, Bulldozer.
Hoped by AMD to be their Hercules to the Hydra of Intel’s Sandy Bridge, news of AMD’s future flagships is starting to worm its way down the tubes.

The two chips, codenamed Zambezi and Valencia, desktop and server respectively, will both feature Bulldozer 8 core architecture at launch for the high-end cpu models.

The Bulldozer design is based on sets of 2 cores, each with a shared L2 cache of 2MB, so the number of cores can be scaled in pairs by combining these demi-cores together on one die, along with the respective L2 caches. This opens the possibility of activating/deactivating cores based on need.

Zambezi slated to receive 8MB of shared L2 cache divided across 4 demi-cores and 8MB of L3 cache shared by all; a total of 16Mb of SRAM, 1.7x the amount in the current top-end model, the 1090t.

8 core power usage is expected to remain consistent with the current x6 CPUs, at 95W and 125W dependent on model, the energy efficiency possibly down, with a switch to 32nm.

Engineering samples are set to be released to AMD partners in December this year, with production candidates set to become available in February, with the large-scale production to commence in April.

Plans also suggest the release of x6 and x4 CPUs based on the Bulldozer architecture in the second quarter of next year, which makes sense, as they can use a different scaling on the Bulldozer design methodology.

Bulldozer seems to be the next big step for AMD, ushering in the new AM3+ socket, “AMD 900” chipsets, HyperTransport 3.1, “Flex FP” floating-point units and a new DDR3 memory controller, bringing the memory’s maximum speed up to 1866MHz.

These new processors and chipsets come together with the Radeon 6000 (Northern Islands) Graphics Cards to form the “Scorpius”, enthusiast-grade platform.