Look Out Bulldozer,Pildriver comes

Look Out Bulldozer, Here Comes Trinity: AMD's 2012 Demo on Video at IDF




by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/14/2011 7:57:00 PM




AMD's Bulldozer CPU is
on the verge of being released. Sever markets will see the CPU soon,
while desktop customers will have to wait until Q4 (which is only a
month away at this point). No one likes to ship a delayed part, but if
you do your job right the part that follows should arrive in a timely
fashion. The follow-on to Bulldozer is called Piledriver and it will
make its debut with AMD's Trinity APU in 2012.

Trinity is a higher end successor to Llano. It will integrate 2 - 4
Piledriver cores and feature some sort of a Radeon GPU on-die.
Performance across the board will be higher than Llano. Piledriver
should offer better performance per clock vs. Bulldozer, but Trinity
won't be targeted at the same high-end market that AMD's FX series based
on Bulldozer will address. Presumably we'll see a Piledriver based FX
CPU at some point down the road. AMD indicated that Trinity was a few
months away, implying an early 2012 launch.

To show the health of Trinity silicon, AMD showed it running Deus Ex in
a suite a block away from IDF. The Trinity demo was done in a generic
notebook chassis. We weren't allowed to benchmark the APU unfortunately.
You can check out the demo in the video below:


If AMD can deliver Trinity in early 2012 and continue to execute beyond
it, we may finally see the end of AMD's CPU woes. The company needs to
put out a solid design and improve on it regularly. With Trinity
following Bulldozer so closely, AMD may be doing just that.




Gallery: Look Out Bulldozer, Here Comes Trinity: AMD's 2012 Demo on Video at IDF

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AMD's Next Gen. Korona High-End Desktop Platform to Fuse Processor with Northbridge



AMD's next generation high-end
desktop platform codenamed "Korona", will fuse the processor silicon
with the northbridge. Currently, the "Scorpius" platform which is
partially launched, follows the slightly older platform layout of a
processor with IMC, and a 2-chip chipset. The PCI-Express root complex
is still in the chipset. Scorpius includes upcoming FX Series "Zambezi"
processors, and AMD 9-series desktop chipset, with AM3+ socket. AMD has a
parallel platform that caters to value-thru-mainstream segments, the
"Lynx" platform, which has already transitioned to the 2-chip model in
which the APU chip packs processor cores, an IMC, a PCI-Express root
complex, and a GPU.

click to enlarge


Korona platform, due for 2012, will consist of a new CPU architecture
called "Piledriver", that succeeds the yet to be released "Bulldozer".
Nothing else is known about Piledriver, except that the first high-end
CPUs based on it will be codenamed "Komodo", and will pack 10 cores.
Since this is a major platform layout rearrangement, Korona will
introduce a new socket called FM2, it is quite logical to assume that
the new socket will be incompatible with AM3+.

Korona combines Komodo CPUs with Hudson D4 Fusion Controller Hub (FCH),
which is just a glorified southbridge, much like the A75 chipset and Intel's
Platform Controller Hub (PCH). The Hudson D4 packs no less than 8 SATA 6
Gb/s ports with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support; an integrated USB 3.0
controller with 4 ports, and 10 USB 2.0 ports.

Given the particulars of this platform, we speculate that Komodo will be
designed to be competitive with Intel's Ivy Bridge LGA1155 processors,
or maybe even Sandy Bridge-E, if only we know the number of DDR3 memory
channels Komodo will have. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't wait for
Zambezi, "2012" is a vague date. For all you know, Korona could even be
released by the very end of 2012.

Source: Zol.com.cn