| K9 | |
| Manuf1: | AMD |
| Predecessor: | K8 - SledgeHammer |
| Successor: | AMD K10 |
| Arch: | AMD64 (x86-64) |
The AMD K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD designed to replace the K8 processors, featuring dual-core processing.
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.
At one time K9 was the internal codename for the dual-core AMD64 processors as the brand Athlon 64 X2;[2] [3] 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.