AMD is preparing an all-new PC processor with up to 16 execution cores. Due out in the first half of 2009, the new architecture is codenamed Bulldozer. In an official announcement, AMD said Bulldozer will be its first substantially new CPU core since the original Athlon 64 processor of 2003. And it'll be the first ground up architectural redesign since the K7 Athlon of 1999.

In that context, it's likely the Bulldozer architecture will provide the foundations of AMD CPUs for many years to come. In other words, the architecture is rather important. The news is the latest in a flurry of announcements from AMD's PR machine in the past week. AMD has already revealed plans for a second-gen quad-core processor known as Shanghai and demoed its upcoming Phenom quad-core desktop chip running at 3GHz.

Meanwhile, the world is still waiting for Barcelona, AMD's first generation quad-core CPU , to appear. AMD has promised that Barcelona will launch later this August.

Bulldozer is the name, crushing Intel is the game

But what about Bulldozer? The big news is that it will form the basis of AMD's first massively multi-core PC processor with up to 16 execution cores. Bulldozer will also be fully compatible with AMD's so-called M-SPACE modular CPU design.

Along with traditional PC processors, therefore, expect to see AMD Fusion CPUs powered by Bulldozer cores but also offering a range of specialised processing units. Think graphics processing cores and high-definition video decoding engines and you'll get an idea of the sort of additional functionality Bulldozer-based Fusion processors will deliver.

As for the main execution cores themselves, they retain the same basic out-of-order superscalar design as AMD's existing PC processors. However, Bulldozer will utilise a deeper instruction pipeline. That's a measure traditionally introduced to allow higher clockspeeds. However, deeper pipelines typically also reduce clock-for-clock performance.

Bulldozer also receives a range of new instructions designed to accelerate media processing and performance in high performance computer clusters. With as many as 16 cores humming away, keeping Barcelona fed with data will obviously be a tough task. In response, AMD says the chip will benefit from "highly scalable memory and I/O performance".