AMD is working on a new x86 chip architecture code-named Bulldozer. The architecture will be used in chips manufactured using the 32-nm process. The company scheduled a 16-core chip code-named Interlagos for release in 2011. Bulldozer is AMD's first properly new processor architecture since the Athlon 64 of 2003. Every AMD chip since then has been a variation on that theme. A tweak here, an added core or floating point unit there, perhaps. But basically the same design.

Not so for Bulldozer. It's a genuinely novel architecture. Novel enough, in fact, to make describing it something of a semantic assault course.

Instead of traditional execution cores, Bulldozer chips will be made up of one or more "modules". Each module packs a pair of integer units and a single shared floating-point resource. The latter is actually a pair of 128-bit FMACs, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

AMD will disclose more details about its forthcoming code-named Bulldozer micro-architecture at Hot Chips conference in late August. Potentially, micro-architectural details may reveal projected performance of the forthcoming multi-core central processing units.

In the program of the Hot Chips conference AMD itself describes Bulldozer core as