Piledriver (microarchitecture)

AMD Piledriver Family 15h is a microarchitecture developed by AMD as the second-generation successor to Bulldozer. It targets desktop, mobile and server markets. It is used for the AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (formerly Fusion), AMD FX, and the Opteron line of processors. The changes over Bulldozer are incremental. Piledriver uses the same "module" design. Its main improvements are to branch prediction and FPU/integer scheduling, along with a switch to hard-edge flip-flops to improve power consumption. This resulted in clock speed gains of 8–10% and a performance increase of around 15% with similar power characteristics. FX-9590 is around 40% faster than Bulldozer-based FX-8150, mostly because of higher clock speed. Products based on Piledriver were first released on 15 May 2012 with the AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), code-named Trinity, series of mobile products. APUs aimed at desktops followed in early October 2012 with Piledriver-based FX-series CPUs released later in the month. Opteron server processors based upon Piledriver were announced in early December 2012. Piledriver includes improvements over the original Bulldozer microarchitecture: Clustered Multi-Thread Higher clock rates Instructions per clock (IPC) improvements Lower power consumption and temperatures Turbo Core 3.0 Faster integrated memory controller (IMC) Fixed hardware divider Improved branch prediction and prefetching Perceptron branch predictor Improved floating-point and integer scheduling Support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) 1.1, FMA3, BMI1 and TBM Larger L1 translation lookaside buffers (TLB) and L2 efficiency improvements Switch to hard-edge flip-flops, allowing a decrease in power consumption Cyclos resonant clock mesh (RCM) technology 17–220 W thermal design power (TDP) APU features table List of AMD FX processorsList of AMD processors with 3D graphics and Opteron The K suffix denotes an unlocked A-series processor. All FX-series processors are unlocked unless otherwise specified. Some Opteron 32 nm processors.