How does the Athlon 64 architecture, known as "Hammer" or "K8", compare with the newly announced Intel Core architecture? Does AMD have a chance to compete with the latest state of the art Intel technology? What tricks make the Core architecture more capable than the current CPUs?
Core's most important competitor, the Hammer ("K8") architecture, has two small but noteworthy advantages. The first is its bigger 2 x 64 KB L1 cache. This is only a small advantage as an 8-way 32 KB cache will have a hit rate close to that of a 2-way 64 KB cache.
The second and more important advantage is the on die memory controller, which lowers the latency to the memory considerably. However, the lower clockspeeds of the Core CPUs (relative to NetBurst) and the faster FSB also lower latency significantly. With the numbers available to us now, we have reason to believe that the Athlon 64 X2's latency advantage will shrink to only 15 to 20%. For comparison, the memory subsystem of the Pentium 4 was almost twice as slow as the Athlon 64 (80-90 ns versus 45-50 ns).
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The second and more important advantage is the on die memory controller, which lowers the latency to the memory considerably. However, the lower clockspeeds of the Core CPUs (relative to NetBurst) and the faster FSB also lower latency significantly. With the numbers available to us now, we have reason to believe that the Athlon 64 X2's latency advantage will shrink to only 15 to 20%. For comparison, the memory subsystem of the Pentium 4 was almost twice as slow as the Athlon 64 (80-90 ns versus 45-50 ns).
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