AMD Bulldozer, solution to Sandy Bridge?

A dual-module/quad-core Bulldozer will not make Intel`s Sandy Bridge quad-core run for its money, but it could likely smoke any Intel dual-core processor. AMD has a brilliant marketing idea, and that is to market processors for the general “I can definitely afford $100 quad-core” market. Intel is by far faster and more productive, yet AMD is enough for most of the public needs. However, now the fight between the two depends on how a one AMD core will compare against one core from Intel. Single Core performance, not sure, but Multi-Core AMD really should have the upper hand Big Time. AMD contends that SMT technologies like Hyper-Threading overload a single-core

architecture are by far faster, while true multi-core processors would waste resources. AMD’s senior vice president says that multi-level, multi-core processors may be the wave of the future. AMD’s dual-core design has a technical elegance that Intel’s can’t match, and that design brings superior performance, but if this new design performs like the Intel Core i5 or i7 line then I’ll bet they will sell quite well. Yes, a 12-core combination of Quad+GPU known as Bulldozer and Octal-Core on a single die could be achieved under this plan. On top of that, the additional integer core on each Bulldozer module doesn’t cost much die area; however, AMD is now stating that the additional core in Bulldozer requires approximately an additional 50% die area. AMD Bulldozer CPUs will also feature SSE5 instruction set. The biggest problem for AMD now is to engineer its six-core CPUs into a 130 W TDP using 45 nm lithography.

Last thought:

In the future I can foresee a regular dual CPU, not dual core, but actual 2 CPUs on the motherboard, like some servers. It would definitely be interesting to be able to buy one CPU for $100, and the when you are ready to upgrade to just buy another. Basically this concept is same as NVIDIA`s SLI or ATI`s CrossFire, just not as simple.