AMD's core design for Bulldozer

AMD's core design for Bulldozer


Anandtech has painted a clearer picture today as to what methods AMD plans to use to build its upcoming 'Bulldozer' CPU family. The way in which AMD arranges the cores and resources with this architecture is quite different to anything we've seen before.

Henceforth AMD is referring to the number of integer cores on a processor when it counts cores. So a quad-core Zambezi is made up of four integer cores, or two Bulldozer modules. An eight-core would be four Bulldozer modules.
It's a distinct shift from AMD's (and Intel's) current method of counting cores. A quad-core Phenom II X4 is literally four Phenom II cores on a single die, if you disabled three you would be left with a single core Phenom II. The same can't be said about a quad-core Bulldozer. The smallest functional block there is a module, which is two cores according to AMD.
The article is a well documented piece that helps give a better perspective on what AMD's main point of focus is with regard to this upcoming major refresh that is hoped to put Intel on its back foot.