AMD K8L – A small preview

A lot has been said about Intel’s new flagships Conroe and Merom. But this does not mean that AMD is just lying helpless in the grass waiting to be walked all over. Its rev. F is on the way but, alas, according to many, it will be an easy prey for Core 2. Anyhow, it is not intended to be AMD’s reply to Core 2. K8L, which we earlier reported about when we told you about the reversed hyperthreading, will not just be a “tuned” K8 core. Not if we are to believe The Inquirer and AMD’s Chuck Moore. According to these soucers the K8L core will be made for Quad Core, with a shared L3 Cache and functions to alter the voltage for each core separately.

We also reported about FB-dimms some time ago, something K8L apparently sports, but it will not be a necessity. Something that tells us this is a very versatile memory controller. Except from this we find a 48-bit addressing unit, a whole bunch of new instructions to complete the already existing SSE3 instructions and a more advanced prefetch unit to feed the cores with data.

We can assure you that we will keep you informed about the new core that is expected to be launched in 2007, but rumors speaks of a launch as early as the end of 2006 if Intel starts taking too much of the market.

Source: Xtremesystems.org :: The Inquirer (1,2)

Picture: K8L Kärnan