Hi folks. I haven't read a Bulldozer article specifically saying how long its pipelines are. Even AMD hasn't officially publicly stated it. Anyway, the other day I was using my tablet to read some articles and I came across an interview with some AMDers. Sorry I can't post the link because I didn't bookmark it, but there, Mike Butler, Bulldozer's chief architect, said that BD's pipe is approximately 25% longer than K10. We know K10 has 12 main pipeline stages (by main, I mean, general integer instructions; FP takes longer to cruise through the pipes), and 1.25 x 12 = 15. I've had some slide images of AMD's other architecture, Bobcat, for quite a while now and what Mike Butler said got my mind racing. I Immediately looked at the Bobcat slides, specifically about its pipelines. Take a look:
From the very start I've always suspected that Bulldozer and Bobcat's pipelines aren't all that different judging from early slides showing their microarchitectures at a very high level. And if you look at the picture above (I believe it's from AMD themselves), you see that the main pipeline is 15 stages long. 15 stages isn't exactly a mile and a half long, but it's the longest pipe AMD has ever created. What do you guys think?
Edit - I think, looking at the slide, that all stages associated with Integer, FP and AGU, total 15 (I would think the arrow from RegRead to AGU is pointing the wrong way). The lowest portion shows what happens after an AGU operation requests something from the caches. DC1/DC2 probably mean Data Cache 1 and 2.
I just realized that my AMD FX-8350 is more powerful than all of my former desktop CPUs combined, from my last Phenom II X4 925 all the way to my ancient NEC V20. And the NEC V20 was probably more expensive if you count inflation. I'm utterly speechless.
