Bulldozer: An Approach to Multithreaded Compute Performance

AMD's Bulldozer module represents a new direction in microarchitecture and includes a number of firsts for AMD, including AMD's multithreaded x86 processor, implementation of a shared Level 2 cache, and x86 processor to incorporate floating-point multiply-accumulate (FMAC). This article discusses the module's multithreading architecture, power-efficient microarchitecture, and subblocks, including the various microarchitectural latencies, bandwidths, and structure sizes.