At AMD's analyst day on Tuesday, Pat Patla, general manager of the company's server and embedded division, said he expected the company's new "Bulldozer" core to be the biggest change in x86 servers in a decade.

Patla began by talking about the current Opteron chips, which he said were the first 8- and 12-core x86 processors, and the first server processor to use less than 6 watts per server. Patla also said AMD has enabled the first 4-processor system that sells for under $5,000; and the first 2P processor available at an entry price of $99.

Patla showed a list of platforms shipping from Acer, HP, Dell, and IBM, acknowledging it took the company longer than it wanted to get the platforms shipped. When Bulldozer comes out, he said, all these systems will be compatible, as they can be upgraded with just a BIOS upgrade. He said he knew most customers don't upgrade, but said they like the flexibility.

He showed a roadmap strategy showing this year's chips and next:

Patla said the market was quickly demanding more cores per server, based on things like virtualization, database, and business applications; and showed competitive benchmarks. (As usual, everyone has different benchmarks.) And he pointed out systems based on AMD CPUs were notably less expensive than those based on Intel CPUs. He cited cloud computing, value 4P systems, and smaller, less expensive servers aimed at small business as market opportunities.

On Bulldozer, he emphasized how this was a whole new design, and again pushed the "two strong threads" vs. a hyperthreaded, single-core chip. And while it has a floating point unit shared among each two integer cores, he said AMD's floating point was twice as fast as its competitors. He said he expected Bulldozer-based systems to offer 50 percent more throughput in the same power and envelope as today's 12-core Opteron processor. Behind this, he cited a redesigned memory controller that allows a 30percent increase in memory performance as well as a flexible 256-bit FPU.

He said the product "taped out" in the second quarter of 2010, with sampling next quarter and production expected to begin in the second quarter of 2011 with widespread availability in the third quarter.

Earlier in the day, AMD showed an updated server roadmap, showing a move to 10 and 20-core versions in 2012.

Going forward, Patla said AMD was closely watching the market for "Fusion for Servers," offering a unified CPU/GPU compute environment based on PCI Express based discrete graphics cards. He said AMD offered such products today, and said a single-die CPU/GPU product in the server space would have to offer better performance and other advantages.

For the embedded market, where AMD has used the Geode brand name, he pushed an embedded version of the Brazos platform, and pointed to products already out such as a "micro server." Going forward, the company is pushing a new line of Fusion processors called the G-series (based on Brazos) and the R-series (to be based on Llano).

Originally posted to Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.