After years and years of trailing behind Intel in terms of pure CPU performance AMD has admitted that the company works on an entirely new CPU architecture that should come out as late as 2015. The new chip architecture, whose codename was not shared, will supersede the current Bulldozer/Piledriver architectures, while offering very high performance that will allow AMD to compete head to head with Intel.
There’s very little information on the upcoming AMD architecture except that it will change everything in architectural terms from what we have become accustomed to seeing from AMD and Bulldozer. This means that AMD will very likely retire the current clustered multi-thread design (CMT) used in Bulldozer and will go back to simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) in order to improve both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. All multimedia instruction sets will be supported too including the 512-bit AVX 3.2 extensions that Intel will debut soon. The really curious fact is that the new AMD design team for the upcoming architecture is lead by Jim Keller who is a famous processor designer and the leading force behind the highly acclaimed AMD K7 and K8 architectures. So the new architecture may really be something revolutionary that may put Intel’s Core i7 processors to shame.
The new AMD chip architecture is expected to arrive no earlier than sometime in 2015 but if AMD concentrates its efforts on Excavator and the rumored 16-core processor with this architecture the new chips may be delayed until 2016 or even later.
Source: X-bit Labs