AMD K9

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The AMD K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD designed to replace the K8 processors, featuring dual-core processing.

[edit] Development

K9 appears originally to have been an ambitious 8 issue per clock cycle core redesign of the K7 or the K8 processor core.^[1] At one point, K9 was the Greyhound project at AMD, and was worked on by the K7 design team beginning in early 2001, with tape-out revision A0 scheduled for 2003. The L1 instruction cache was said to hold decoded instructions, essentially the same as Intel's trace cache.

The existence of a massively parallel CPU design concept for heavily multi threaded applications has also been revealed, as a planned successor to K8. This was reportedly canceled in the conceptualization phase, after about 6 months' work.^[2]

At one time K9 was the internal codename for the dual-core AMD64 processors as the brand Athlon 64 X2,^[3][4] however AMD has distanced itself from the old K series naming convention, and now seeks to talk about a portfolio of products, tailored to different markets.^[5]

[edit] Naming

Some claim that the cease of usage of the K-nomenclature is likely an attempt by AMD to avoid ridicule caused by the similarities between "K9" (read as K-nine) and terms which are similar in pronunciation with some terms such as "canine" (/ˈkeɪnaɪn/), but this is only conjecture, considering K7 and K8 were only internal codenames for the processors that AMD marketed as the Athlon and the Athlon 64, respectively.

[edit] References