AMD Bobcat, Llano and Fusion
Bobcat is the name for AMD’s new low power CPU core design. It’s meant to rival Intel’s Atom and CULV processors in terms of speed and power consumption thanks to its miniscule sub-1W power usage. Unlike Atom (and like CULV), it’s an out-of-order design which means threads can be processed in a different order to when they were received, which is a considerably more efficient and responsive way of churning through calculations working (the analogy here is a caravan backing up traffic on a single carriageway road).
Atom doesn’t use this method as the extra processing needed to work out what order to put the calculations adds a considerable amount of extra circuitry, which takes up space on the silicon and thus uses more power. AMD apparently has seen a way round this or feels it has found the right balance of speed and power saving.
So, in essence this is a ‘proper’ modern CPU. Indeed AMD points out these new designs will have 90 percent of the compute power of a current mainstream CPU, but will take up half the silicon area. Depending on what you define as mainstream this could result in chips that sit somewhere above the level of an Intel CULV or somewhere on or below an Atom. We suspect it will nestle somewhere between the two, which if the chips deliver on battery life as well is going to be a very nice middle ground.
