Inside the AMD Bulldozer Architecture

Power Management

AMD added some interesting features for managing power in their Bulldozer architecture, the most important being “power gating,” which allows the CPU to simply cut the power from unused CPU units to save power. It can also completely turn off any unused CPU “core.” AMD also added a feature to measure CPU activity to estimate power being dissipated. The phrase “Hardware uses higher frequency when power limit allows” is an indication that AMD is adding a technology similar to Intel’s Turbo Boost, which automatically overclocks the CPU if thermal dissipation remains within specs.

Figure 7: Power management