At today's Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif., AMD revealed new details of its two next-generation x86 processor core implementations, codenamed "Bulldozer" for servers and performance PCs and "Bobcat" for low-power notebooks and small-form-factor desktops. The successors to AMD's current K8 core are due to debut sometime in 2011 and late in 2010, respectively.

Bobcat is a rival to Intel's Atom, a 64-bit x86 core that AMD says delivers 90 percent of the performance of today's mainstream PC processors in half the area and with a fraction of the power -- with core power gating and a microarchitecture optimized for low power, the core is capable of operation on less than one watt. It supports out-of-order instruction execution for higher performance and up-to-date SSE1-3 multimedia and virtualization instructions.

Bobcat will be the CPU portion of AMD's first Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU), "Ontario" -- a notebook chip that will combine a dual-core CPU and programmable GPU on one die. The first desktop Fusion CPU/GPU, "Llano," will be based on today's Phenom II core.

New from the ground up, Bulldozer is a modular design, with each module consisting of two four-pipeline integer cores that share a pair of 128-bit floating-point multiply accumulate units and a Level 2 cache. A Bulldozer-based chip consists of multiple modules -- four for an eight-core CPU, for example -- sharing a Level 3 cache, DDR3 memory controller, and Northbridge for linking to peripherals.

The result, AMD says, will be 33 percent more cores (eight or 16 versus six or 12) and an estimated 50 percent more throughput in the same power envelope as the company's current "Magny Cours" Opteron server CPUs when Bulldozer ships in 2011.