AMD is ready to take on Intel, showing off it’s hotly-anticipated pair of smaller-device centric core processors.

Horses for courses, it would seem.

Hot on the heels of the announcement that the Intel Atom 550 was ready to ship, AMD has begun showing off the “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat” like proud parents of newborns. Newborns that can run netbooks, that is.

The Bulldozer design, which will be built with 32nm SOI technology, is promising ‘performance and scalability’ and will be aimed at mainstream client and server markets.

The high performance processor core technology will be appearing in the company’s chips in 2011 and is a completely new design.

AMD say that the core contains ‘innovative design that delivers true core functionality by pairing two integer execution cores with components that can be shared as needed.”

This will offer 33% more cores and an estimated 50 per cent increase in throughput ‘in the same power envelope as Magny-Cours’.

Bobcat is an x86 processor, likely to be used in portable devices.

It is a sub-one-watt capable core which features an out-of-order execution engine, has complete ISA support and can be easily re-used.

It will be a building block of AMD’s first APU “Ontario” next year, and the official word is that it will offer “90 per cent of AMD’s current mainstream notebook CPU in less than half the area and a fraction of the power”, which means that 2011 could be very interesting indeed.

Can’t wait for 2011 to get your hands on an AMD processor? Here’s one that Shelton assures is great value for money.