AMD K8 is the name of the architecure all Athlon 64 and Opteron processors are based on and it is this architecture that has made AMD the company it is today. Intel has not been able to launch a worthy competitor as the main opponent has been the NetBurst architecture. The NetBurst era is about to end though and during the end of the second quarter the first processor based on Intel’s new processor architecture, Core, will arrive. This has a completely different base design than NetBurst, but one might wonder how Core compares to AMD K8 and even Intel’s earlier architectures, NetBurst and Pentium M.
At Anandtech they’ve pusblished an article where they take a closer look at Core in comparison with AMD’s K8 architecture. This is something that has already been heavily discussed and will be even more discussed as time passes since many Intel followers have already predicted the death of the K8 architecture as Intel will launch Core. Something that will hardly happen, but there is still a lot of potential behind Core.
“Compared to the excellent AMD K8/Hammer architecture, the Core CPU is simply a wider, more efficient and more out of order CPU. When I suggested to Jack Doweck that the massive execution resources may not be fully used until SMT is applied, he disagreed completely. Memory disambiguation should push the current limits of ILP in integer loads a lot higher, and the massive bandwidth that the L1 and L2 can deliver should help Core to come close to the execution utilization percentages of the current P-M.”
