Inside AMD K10 Architecture

[Hardware Secrets Team]

There has been a new article posted.

Title: Inside AMD K10 Architecture
URL: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/480

Here is a snippet:
"K10 is the name of the new architecture that new processors from AMD will be using, like the forthcoming Phenom and the Opteron based on the much expected “Barcelona” core. In fact, a lot ..."

Comments on this article are welcome.

Best regards,
Hardware Secrets Team
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com

[Presler]

Thank you very much for sharing.

Some of the new features of the AMD K10 were adopted for Intel Core Microarchitecture (the 32-byte fetch unit and the 128-bit internal data paths). AMD even "branded" them to to look that intel does not have these.

With the un-ganged memory controller, HT3.0, and the other energy-saving features give the K10 a real thumbs up. I hope these processors reach the local PC stores soon. I'm really excited.

Cheers to all. 8)

[kabugaw]

The K10 architecture uses a 2MB L3 Cache while the Intel Q-series uses 2 Core 2 Duo processors combined, meaning there's no L3 Cache in the Intel quads. Can't AMD use a common L2 Cache for the phenoms instead of an L3? I'm not sure, but I got the idea that stuff stored at the L1 is faster to fetch than those at the L2. Does this mean that stuff stored at the L3 would take longer to fetch?

In other words, is an L3 cache needed for true quads?

[Gabriel Torres]

is an L3 cache needed for true quads?

AMD thinks that this is the case, while Intel doesn't.

Cheers,
Gabriel.

[kabugaw]

I guess Intel doesn't really feel the pressure to produce native quads since even the Phenom doesn't offer much competition to it's old Core 2 architecture. Maybe until Intel produces its own native quads, we'll just have to see if they do use an L3 Cache for their processors.