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Essay on The Architecture of the Dual Core AMD Processor
It had become clear, by early in 2004 that the performance of single core x86 processors could no longer be increased by the means of raising clock speed, increasing cache size and shrinking processor size, without increasing heat so much that the computer would be impossible to cool. AMD has neatly solved this problem with their new dual-core processors.
AMD has announced that their future generation of chips will have multiple cores. The current multicore chips will be the standard for all server processors pretty soon. Earlier processor performance was judged on its clock speed and the number of cores. If the processor manufacturers keep increasing the number of cores of a conventional processor with the current speed then the new measure of processor performance would be the number of cores.
The die of the dual core AMD Opteron contains both the cores which are similar to that of Intel’s. That is all that is similar between the two. The Opteron’s architecture had been put forward keeping dual core processing in mind. But at that time the existing 130nm rules restricted it from reaching the dual core technology. The current transition to the 90nm made dual core possible. (Business Wire, 2004)
The key to AMD’s performance is that its both cores communicate with each other directly on the die. This takes place through a system request queue and crossbar. However on Intel’s Pentium D, the two cores use an 800 MHz front side bus which creates a bottleneck for the performance. This creates a negative effect on single threaded software. (Michael Singer, 2004)
The architecture of AMD’s chips is much more sophisticated than that of Intel’s due to the on-die Northbridge of the K8 architecture. Usually the mainly discussed factor of performance increase in AMD’s dual core chips is the K8's on-die memory controller, the on-die NorthBridge is also extremely important for dual core....
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