During a press conference on Thursday, AMD stated that it will offer a new dual-core processor for laptop computers, rumored to be codenamed Bulldozer.
Unlike current AMD mobile CPU offerings, Bulldozer will be completely redesigned from the ground-up to feature high performance while increasing its battery life. Bulldozer will feature split power planes between cores and the on-die northbridge, a mobile-optimized on-die northbridge, and a HyperTransport 3 bus with link power management. Bulldozer will be built on AMD's 65nm process, most likely with additional mobile optimizations such as increased gate oxide thickness.
Both of Bulldozer's cores can be seperately started and stopped based on application need. HyperTransport thoughtput will dynamically throttle based on the current core state. These two technologies work together to further improve battery life.
We speculate that Bulldozer will still share many similarities with its desktop counterpart, K8L. Since Intel's Pentium 4 desktop processor was thermally inefficient, Intel was forced to base its Pentium M mobile processor off the older Pentium 3. Since K8L will feature relatively high thermal efficiency, AMD doesn't need to completely redesign the basic pipeline structure to meet its goals for Bulldozer. We expect there to be at least two 128-bit single-cycle SSE units, OoO load execution, dual 128-bit loads per cycle, an updated memory controller, and a reworked branch prediction unit. Judging from the die shot, there looks to be around 2x32KB L1 cache and up to 2MB L2 cache per core. The end result, regardless of our speculation, is a CPU that will be extremely competitive with Intel's upcoming Merom processor.
Bulldozer's platform will also be changed. Laptops that use Bulldozer processors must feature graphics cards with HD video hardware acceleration. The Bulldozer platform will use 802.11n wireless adapters as well.
AMD has stated that Bulldozer is set for a mid-2007 launch. However, industry insiders have told us that Bulldozer is currently slated for 1H 2007, most likely Q2 2007.
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