AMD K10 Architecture

[Zeus_Hunt]

A few months ago, the American company Advanced Micro Devices – AMD, as the second biggest manufacturer in the processor market, launched the new K10 microarchitecture onto the market, in the form of a server solution codenamed Barcelona. Barcelona is the new Opteron which brings many novelties in the fields of virtualization, multi-socket scaling, as well as many improvements in multithread software synchronization.

As far as desktop computers are concerned, the K10 architecture also brings along an entirely new platform, which should unify all vital system components under a single brand – Spider. Under the hood of Spider are an AMD Phenom X4 “quad-core” processor, and AMD-ATi chipset, and an AMD-ATi graphics processor (or more) which can be placed in single or CrossFireX work regime. The result of all this is a complete multimedia/gaming machine entirely harmonized under AMD's roof. The processor itself is a “pure” AMD product and is largely based on the previous generation, K8 architecture, but with a plethora of improvements. The accent was certainly on performance improvements in multithread programs, i.e. programs which are able to use multiple cores effectively. Many would presume that doubling the number of cores has double performance as a natural result. Yet not everything is that simple. It is much alike the problem of making ten workers to do a single worker's job ten times faster. This is uneasy, as you would have to segment the job in such a way that they can be performed in parallel, and putting the product together is also time-consuming to a certain extent; therefore, the performance jump can never be linear. Phenom and the K10 family in general were designed to comply with the requirements of the increasingly popular multithread software.

Statutory Warning: Quite a long read.... Quite a lot technical.

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[dock98]

"Statutory Warning: Quite a long read.... Quite a lot technical." that's an understatement.