AMD’s Steamroller To Arrive A Year Early

In a recent presentation by AMD’s PR and Marketing department it showed off the technology behinds its new Steamroller core design. The new AMD micro-architecture is on track to be released this year in the form of AMD Opteron server class processors. This is a hugely surprising development as Q3-Q4 2014 was cited as the most likely release frame for the new AMD CPU architecture. The updated Opteron roadmap, which you can see above, states 2013 as the release year for Steamroller Opterons but nothing much has been said about the consumer side of things.

Reports suggest AMD has pushed forward its plans for Steamroller by nearly a year, probably because it feels it is being left behind by Intel unless it does things a lot faster. The new range of Steamroller CPUs are expected to be compatible with the current selection of sockets and will support native PCI Express generation 3 support. Backwards socket compatibility is one of the AMD trademarks so we are glad to see they are retaining this.

Consumers should probably expect to see Steamroller arrive in 2014 at some point with Q2 seeming the most likely period. But what to expect in terms of performance? Well reports are quoting 5-10% more single core performance and a 30% improvement in operations per cycle for the CPU as a whole compared to the Bulldozer architecture. In essence the cores will work drastically better together than they did in Bulldozer/Piledriver but single core improvements will only be typical of generational improvements.

What are your thoughts on AMD bringing the launch forward? Is it a good idea for them to remain competitive? Do they risk releasing a half-finished product?

You can see more details from the slide presentation below and read more detail on Steamroller at the source link.

Source