Ankur Gupta Online

AMD executives reveal more cache, more quad-core en route for AMD

Over the last few months much as been revealed about AMD’s next-generation quad-core architecture. This architecture, previously dubbed K8L by Henri Richard, is scheduled to be the first monolithic quad-core design.

Since unveiling the details of the chip, AMD has started to use the codename Barcelona to describe the server variant. The Barcelona chipset is a member of the Cities family — all server-based AMD codenames for 2007 and 2008 are named after Cities. Desktop codenames are all named after Stars even though architecturally, many Stars and Cities CPUs are identical.

AMD has revealed to DailyTech that Barcelona, which AMD just recently demonstrated, will be “enhanced” with the Shanghai core in early 2008. AMD’s Senior Vice President, Marty Seyer, would not elaborate on what the enhancements are, claiming that the new core would simply “bring further performance enhancements, as well as cache efficiency.”

When the K8L architecture was publically unveiled this past June, AMD’s Corporate Vice President and CTO Phil Hester claimed that the initial Barcelona processor would utilize 2MB of L3 shared cache — hinting that additional versions of K8L with larger caches are roadmap possibilities. Although we cannot speak for the other enhancements, the additional cache Hester described in June 2006 is almost certainly present in Shanghai.

As with previous generations of Opteron processors, Barcelona will only encompass the multi-socket codename. For single-socket servers, Budapest will act as AMD’s city codename for the 1xxx Opteron processor. There is no “cache-upgrade” version of Budapest in the way that Shanghai is an upgrade for Barcelona. This is likely due to the fact that whatever enhancements are on Shanghai do not necessarily show performance gains on single-socket systems.

According to AMD’s roadmaps, Shanghai will still utilize DDR2 memory, though DDR3 processors are also slated for production around that time as well. “DDR2 is going to serve us quite nicely for several years,” added Seyer.
Source

Popularity: 1% [?]