Forget Phenom, AMD's next big desktop chip will let CPU cores do a tricky multi-and-single thread dance for more performance.
Folks aboard the good ship AMD have promised that its next-generation CPU marchitecture will be, as the Pythons would have it, something completely different.
Giuseppe Amato, the grandly-titled Technical Direct of Sales and Marketing for EMEA, let slip in a recent interview that "If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different."
He declined to elucidate further, but it seems that the statement re-iterates DAAMIT's committment to the changes previously mooted at the company's Technology Analyst Day way back in the summer of last year. As a prelude to its fully-fledged Fusion product, which aims to combine GPU and CPU products onto a single chip, AMD is moving to a modular core design which it has called M-Space.
Its next-gen desktop chip, coded Bulldozer, makes use of this kind of design architecture to enable it to combine cores to work more efficiently on single-threaded tasks whilst being flexible enough to split off and work on multi-threaded tasks too. Bulldozer is a complete clean break from the K8 architecture, so will truly be something new.
Of course, given that most of this information is already out there on the Web thanks to on-the-record presentations by AMD staff, it seems strange that Amato wasn't willing to discuss it. Perhaps he didn't get the memo?