Yesterday we showed some leaked information on AMDs upcoming Piledriver CPUs, today AMD officially announced information (check this presentation) on a new architecture; Steamroller. The new 28nm chips using this architecture should have lower power usage while performing better. The details were unveiled by AMDs CTO Mark Papermaster during the Hot Chips conference. In 2011 AMD introduced a new modular micro-architecture. The two cores of each module share components which should have resulted in better performance than Intel's Hyperthreading but lower performance than two seperate cores. The architecture debuted in AMDs FX Bulldozer CPUs but was not able to deliver the performance as expected.
The Piledriver architecture should already be an improvement but in 2013 AMD hopes to introduce Steamroller which should be an even bigger improvement. These chips would build on Bulldozer and Piledriver architecture but should again be faster and consume less watts. The bottlenecks in Bulldozer and Piledriver are e.g. the shared fetch and decode hardware in the front-end. In Steamroller the decode hardware is doubled, which means the rest of the core doesn't have to wait for instructions. The fetch hardware remains shared between cores. With all the changes, AMD expects a 30% increase in performance.
AMD also improved the shared floating point unit which each Steamroller module has. The FPU still has the same execution capabilities, but it has become smaller. Also the MMX unit and 128-bit FMAC pipes share some hardware. With the reduction of the pipeline resources AMD hopes to deliver the same throughput while consuming less power and smaller hardware, something that already should have been done in Bulldozer and Piledriver CPUs.
Also cache of the CPUs has been changed, L1 cache sizes have gone up and also the interface between L1 and L2 cache has been improved. Even better, L2 cache memory that isn't used can be turned off which should result in less power usage.
The first products using the Steamroller architecture should appear in 2013, and should bring AMD less power consuming but more powerfull processorcores which can be used in AMDs upcoming APUs. In 2014 AMD will introduce another new architecture: Excavator with, you guessed it, even better performance.
