by John Fruehe
One of the most interesting features planned for our next generation core architecture, which features the new “Bulldozer” core, is something called the “Flex FP”, which delivers tremendous floating point capabilities for technical and financial applications.

For those of you not familiar with floating point math, this is the high level stuff, not 1+1 integer math that most applications use. Technical applications and financial applications that rely on heavy-duty use of floating point math could see huge increases in performance over our existing architectures, as well as far more flexibility.

The heart of this new feature is a flexible floating point unit called the Flex FP. This is a single floating point unit that is shared between two integer cores in a module (so a 16-core “Interlagos” would have 8 Flex FP units). Each Flex FP has its own scheduler; it does not rely on the integer scheduler to schedule FP commands, nor does it take integer resources to schedule 256-bit executions. This helps to ensure that the FP unit stays full as floating point commands occur. Our competitors’ architectures have had single scheduler for both integer and floating point, which means that both integer and floating point commands are issued by a single shared scheduler vs. having dedicated schedulers for both integer and floating point executions.

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