AMD K9

This article is about the AMD internal project for dual-core processor microarchitecture. For actual dual-core processor products, see Athlon 64 X2. For other uses, see K9.

The AMD K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD designed to replace the K8 processors, featuring dual-core processing.

Development

K9 appears originally to have been an ambitious 8 issue per clock cycle core redesign of the K7 or the K8 processor core.[1] At one point, K9 was the Greyhound project at AMD, and was worked on by the K7 design team beginning in early 2001, with tape-out revision A0 scheduled for 2003. The L1 instruction cache was said to hold decoded instructions, essentially the same as Intel's trace cache.

The existence of a massively parallel CPU design concept for heavily multi threaded applications has also been revealed, as a planned successor to K8. This was reportedly canceled in the conceptualization phase, after about 6 months' work.[2]

At one time K9 was the internal codename for the dual-core AMD64 processors as the brand Athlon 64 X2,[3][4] however AMD has distanced itself from the old K series naming convention, and now seeks to talk about a portfolio of products, tailored to different markets.[5]

References

  1. ↑ The Inquirer report, 3 November 2005
  2. ↑ http://www.anandtech.com/show/2229/5, Anandtech.com, 2007-05-11, p. 5, retrieved 2012-01-23
  3. ↑ The Inquirer report, 6 February 2007
  4. ↑ Video interview of Giuseppe Amato (AMD's Technical Director, Sales and Marketing EMEA) done in February 2007
  5. ↑ AMD hatches new naming plan for chip generations, news.cnet.com, 2004-11-15, retrieved 2012-01-23