X-bit labs

AMD's Next Generation Microarchitecture Preview: from K8 to K8L

Category: CPU

by Yury Malich

[ 08/22/2006 | 07:36 PM ]

New Intel Core 2 Duo processors took the lead in the processor market these days and AMD has nothing to respond with at this time. However, next year AMD promises to release a Conroe-killer, the CPU based on new K8L microarchitecture. Our newest article is devoted to the details of AMD K8L microarchitecture and how it compares with Core and K8 from the theoretical prospective.

Table of contents:

• Instruction Fetching
  
• Decoding
  
• Integer Instructions
  
• Floating Point Instructions
  
• Memory Subsystem
  
• Conclusion
  

July 27, 2006, Intel officially introduced its new Core 2 processor to the public. Based on the Conroe core, it proved to be a breakthrough in terms of CPU performance. AMD just doesn’t have a processor that could match the newest top-end models of the Core 2 series.

Unfortunately for AMD, the company was overconfident with its highly successful K8 series and didn’t prepare a timely response. According to the recently published roadmaps, AMD will release a new processor currently known under its codename of K8L (other sources refer to it as the K10) in the middle of the next year, i.e. a full year after Intel’s release of the Core 2.

The K8L is being originally designed as a quad-core chip. Its four execution cores will reside on a single silicon wafer and will all be connected to a shared L3 cache, to a common crossbar and to a common memory controller.

The already known and expected micro-architectural improvements in the upcoming processor will be discussed in this article. We will compare it with the Conroe micro-architecture to evaluate its possible fortes and weaknesses as well as future perspectives.

Fig. 1