L O S T C I R C U I T S

Specs at One Glance

Aside from the TurboCORE Technology, not much has really changed. Of course, there is the addition of the extre two cores and, borrowed from the server processor, the Smart Cache technology that copies the L2 contents into the L3 cache if a core goes into deep power down state. Otherwise, the specs are as follows:

• True Six Core Processing
• AMD Turbo CORE Technology
• L1 Cache: 128KB (64KB Instruction + 64KB Data) x6(six-core)
• L2 Cache: 512KB x6(six-core)
• L3 Cache: 6MB Shared L3
• 45-nanometer SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
• HyperTransport™ 3.0 16-bit/16-bit link at up to 4000MT/s full duplex; or up to 16.0GB/s I/O bandwidth
• Up to 21GB/sec dual channel memory bandwidth
• Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz) and PC3 10600
• Direct Connect Architecture
• AMD Balanced Smart Cache
• AMD Dedicated Multi-cache
• AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™)Technology
• AMD PowerNow™ 3.0 Technology
• AMD Dynamic Power Management
• Multi-Point Thermal Control
• AMD CoolCore™ Technology

Thuban die shot (courtesy of AMD) with the 6 cores in the top part of the photograph and the shared L3 cache in the bottom portion. Balanced Smart Cache is the already mentioned copying of L2 cache data in to the L3 to maintain cache-coherency if cores go into power-down states. Dedicated Multi-cache is just another word for a shared L3 cache and the rest is essentially whatever was introduced with Deneb.

All the different code names make it a bit difficult to keep track of what is what, for a more comprehensive comparison, the most important features for each model are listed below again.

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