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AMD have revealed a further key details regarding their next-generation processors. AMD's aging Stars architecture, though competitive by aggressive pricing, desperately needs a revamp. Much delayed, and much anticipated, Bulldozer has finally taped out and will follow K10/Stars which itself was much delayed to 2007. Bulldozer will be fabricated at Globalfoundries 32nm, and is set to sample in 2010. The time from tape out to general release for CPUs is about 9 to 12 months, so Bulldozer is well on its way to a 2011 release. Meanwhile, AMD Ontario is set to release early - as soon as Q4 2010.

Ontario will be the first Fusion part, as we know, designed for low power portable devices, like netbooks. Any netbook user is constantly frustrated by the weak Atom CPUs which seems to dominate the netbook landscape. AMD is seeking to change that with a APU that provides the performance of a low-end mainstream notebook under 10W (for the CPU) as well as bringing a massive step in graphics with DX11 class graphics. Ontario consists of 2 Bobcat cores, a DX11 HD 5000 class GPU, a PCI-e 2 controller and a DDR3 memory controller all on one system-on-chip. The power consumption for Ontario is expected to be under 18W. The entire Ontario die, amazingly, is said to be half the die size of the low-end mainstream CPUs it matches on performance, despite the addition of the GPU. Ontario will be manufactured on the already available 40nm TSMC Bulk process, the same as current Nvidia and ATI GPUs. It is set to release in Q4 2010, ahead of schedule.

As for Bulldozer, it remains on track for the vague release in "2011". Xbitlabs suggests that the first Bulldozer based server CPUs - Interlagos - with 12 to 16 cores, could release in H1 2011. Other versions, presumably including the desktop 4 to 8 core CPU Zambezi, will release in H2 2010.

All details were revealed by AMD CEO Dirk Meyer at the Q2 Financial conference call.

Reference: Xbitlabs