AMD’s Bobcat low power successor “Jaguar” detailed

AMD’s Bobcat was developed to compete with Intel’s low power Atom solution. Bobcat spawned Brazos and currently Brazos 2.0 is far superior to anything Intel’s Atom can offer right now. Intel is planning to give the Atom’s a boost by adding two extra cores, shrinking to 22nm and dramatically improving graphics performance 400 to 700%.

AMD will hit back before Intel can do that with Jaguar, the Bobcat successor.

“AMD has added a lot of new SIMD capabilities and lots of new instruction sets to its new design and an overhaul of the floating point unit (FPU) was clearly needed. Jaguar now comes with most – if not all – of Bobcat’s abilities, but it also adds complete architectural computational support for SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL, MOVBE, AVX, XSAVE, XSAVEOPT, FC16, and BMI instructions. Since most SIMD instructions are 128-bit wide – if not wider, AMD decided to double the width of its FPU pipelines from 64-bit to 128-bit. SSE instructions required two passes on the Bobcat, but they now can be handled in one single pass, and this is no small feat.”

Even with all those positives its still worth noting that AVX support is slightly lacking on the new Jaguar processors. AVX needs 256 bit FPU pipelines which it won’t have to perform best, but AVX is currently emerging and will become more important in the future – by then we expect AMD to have adapted for this anyway.

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