AMD K8L and 4x4
We spent some time in conference with AMD during their analyst call last week and for sure they are working real hard to keep Intel at bay, providing further innovation and continuing engineering on their existing platforms. RealWorld Tech has a perspective as well, with respect to what AMD is conjuring for their roadmap efforts.
AMD's spring analyst day presented a lot of news on future plans, products and focus areas at the company. The most interesting part was a nice preview of the next generation K8 microprocessor. The K8L, as it has been dubbed, is a strong incremental improvement over the 65nm shrink of the K8. There will be several changes to the microarchitecture, most notably in the memory hierarchy. The level of integration will also increase, enhancing the scalability of systems built around this next generation part, which is due out in the middle of 2007...Preliminarily, the "K8L" looks to be a very solid MPU, elegantly integrating four cores together. The other topic we covered was AMD's 4x4 announcement, which is somewhat more niche. Fortunately for end-users, 4x4 is a well planned out design from the technical perspective and not a simple grab for the quad core crown.
