Advanced Micro Devices confirmed its grand plan to gradually improve Bulldozer micro-architecture in the coming years and also promised to release central processing units (CPUs) with up to 20 cores in 2012.

As process technologies and designs of microprocessors get finer, AMD gains ability to pack more performance into its chips without increase of power consumption. In 2011 the company will release the first iteration of processors based on Bulldozer micro-architecture and in the course of next three years the firm will continue to concentrate on reducing of power consumption per die. As a result, in 2012 the world's second largest supplier of chips intends to roll-out Enhanced Bulldozer architecture and in 2013 the firm plans to unveil the Next-Generation Bulldozer processors.

The most powerful AMD processor in 2012 will be code-named Terramar chip with up to twenty cores and aimed at dual-socket and quad-socket servers. The Terramar will likely be a multi-chip module (MCM) powered by two Sepang chips with up to ten x86 cores. Both products will be made using 32nm silicon-on-insulator process technology.

AMD's Terramar processor will use new AMD G2012 infrastructure and will support quad-channel DDR3 memory as well as PCI Express 3.0 controller. The Sepang chip will use C2012 inftastructure, will sport triple-channel memory controller and will also support PCIe 3.0.

AMD remained tight-lipped about particular improvements of AMD's enhanced Bulldozer and next-generation Bulldozer micro-architectures apart from the fact that the new chips will consume less energy per core.

Last week it transpired that the company had already initiated work with software developers to optimize programs for processor currently known as "BDver2" (Bulldozer version 2). At present it is known that AMD's BDver2 chips support a number of new extensions, including BMI (bit manipulation instructions), TBM (trailing bit manipulation) and FMA3 (three operand FMA [fused multiply-add] instructions). While there are no solid details, it is possible that enhanced Bulldozer is indeed BDver2, whereas the next-generation Bulldozer may be BDver3.

Tags: AMD, Bulldozer, Terramar, Sepang, 32nm