InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology
e2 Conference & Expo - Boston 2013
Inside AMD's Phenom And Opteron Quad-Core Architectures

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AMD is emphasizing the ability to separately control the voltage of each of Barcelona's four cores, a big aid in power management.

Phenom will be the official product name for AMD's Agena desktop quad core.  Along with new processors, AMD's desktop roadmap indicates improvements to its HyperTransport processor I/O technology and to graphics support.  This die shot identifies the different functional units of Barcelona, AMD's upcoming quad-core Opteron.  Barcelona boasts numerous improvements aimed at boosting instruction throughput.  A basic block diagram of Barcelona, from a paper AMD engineers delivered at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, in February 2007.  Family 10h is AMD's internal designation for the architecture used in Barcelona and Agena.  NUMA, for non-uniform memory access, is a design used in high-end multiprocessing systems, such as the one shown here with four quad-core Barcelonas, for 16 total physical processors.  The Barcelona block clearly identifies the functional units. Note the mention of 95 W and lower-power 68-W versions of the processor.  AMD is emphasizing the ability to separately control the voltage of each of Barcelona's four cores, a big aid in power management.  There will be three power bands for Barcelona: HE at 68 W , SP at 95 W, and SE at 120W.  Puma 


AMD is emphasizing the ability to separately control the voltage of each of Barcelona's four cores, a big aid in power management.