AMD’s Flexes New Floating-Point Unit

“Our initial commentary on the upcoming AMD Bulldozer
architecture covered its basic features and design, including the
transition to a modular architecture, but in a recent blog, AMD
expanded on the feature set by outlining the new Flex FP
floating-point capabilities of the Bulldozer microarchitecture.

“A floating-point unit operates on larger numbers with decimal
points and uses higher-level math like exponential and
trigonometric calculations. This differs from integer math
processing with its basic round integers and more rudimentary math.
Obviously, floating-point performance would not affect all areas of
computing, but it does have a significant impact when processing
financial or technical data.

“AMD’s Flex FP goes back to the basic concept behind Bulldozer,
that of a fully modular design where two integer cores are linked
to a single floating-point unit in a processor module. This single
FPU is now Flex FP.”

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