AMD Quad Core K8L & 4×4 Low-down
On June 1st, 2007, AMD held its annual Technology Analyst Conference at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. While much of it focused on AMD and its overall business strategy for the next few years, a good chunk was dedicated to K8L. Phil Hester, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer gave a relatively detailed presentation discussing K8L’s modular design and K8L’s quad-core specification.
AMD’s Agenda before K8L
On June 1st, AMD held its annual Technology Analyst Conference at their headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. While much of it focused on AMD and its overall business strategy for the next few years, a good chunk was dedicated to K8L. Phil Hester, Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, gave a relatively detailed presentation discussing K8L’s modular design and K8L’s quad-core specification.
Problems with new micro-processors
If you look inside a microprocessor today you will find perhaps 10 to 15 major functional groups, and these are mostly applied within a monolithic design. It is possible to identify each functional group individually but the interfaces between them are not as clear or definable as they could be. The problem with this is that it takes a lot of engineering resources to modify how these individual yet undefined pieces work to create an updated processor model.
AMD’s Modular Concept
AMD’s modular concept is to define each of the building blocks better so as to construct optimal designs for each of the market segments easily. This will allow AMD to do two things. Firstly, it will enable them to have one core architecture but develop very different processors for each market segment. Secondly, it will be far easier for AMD to change specific functional groups so to increase performance in the server market or desktop market, or the low power market. Basically whenever they need to react to the needs of a specific market, they can quickly and cost-effectively provide solutions. We may never again see a new architecture in the traditional sense as AMD can update any building blocks to create a new processor family effectively.
Conclusion
The gray box named “other” represents the extra capacity for new functional blocks that can be added in the future. Possible uses here could be for co-processor functionality and so on. The genius behind modular should be clear to all.
