AMD has now released more information about its coming K8l architecture in the form of ’Barcelona’. The updates are many and if anyone doubted it; they are impressive. AMD has increased the length of the multimedia instructions the execution unit can handle to 128bit while it has also increased the instruction bandwidth to 32byte/cycle. It has redesigned the memory controllers so that they can work independently of each other and introduce DDR3 support, plus FB-DIMM, even if AMD doesn’t believe in the first generation of this one. K8l has also been updated to handle SSE instuctions in a way that reminds us of Core, the same with the branch prediction. The fact is that the two do display som striking similarities, but also some colossal differences.
Leave a Reply