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Intel Dual Core Architecture

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CPU Technologies Table of Contents Intel’s Dual Core Architecture 3 Evolution of the Dual Core Architecture 3 The AMD Opteron 3 64-Bit Extensions 4 Intel Itanium Processor 5 Cache 5 Factors That Limit a Processor 6 How the Processors Compare 6 References 7 Intel’s Dual Core Architecture Before the use of multi-core processors CPUs used only a single core. Moore’s Law stated that the amount of transistors located in a CPU would double every two years. This was true until the size of the transistors became too small and electron leakage started to occur. This caused Intel to start to look for new ways of increasing processing power without suffering from electron leakage. Intel’s …show more content…

This CPU also has the capability to operate in either 32-bit, 64-bit, or a mixture of both modes. The Opteron comes able to be inserted into 2-socket or 4-socket multiprocessor configurations respectively. The Opteron comes in either 1, 2, 4, or 8 processor configurations. The multiple processors allow for increased shared workload with greater power efficiency. The Opteron also takes advantage of a built in DDR SDRAM / DDR2 SDRAM memory controller. This controller is on the chip itself instead of the normal north bridge locations. The controller is run off of the processor core clock and for this reason avoids the latency associated with running to the north bridge for memory control. Another major feature of the Opteron is the included Hyper-transport. This Hyper-transport is a high-speed connection between the processor core and the chipset. The width of the bus and the frequency of the bus can be changed to achieve up to 6400MB/sec going one way. This allows for faster instructions to be sent to the various peripheral components (PCI-X, AGP, PCI, IDE). Both the built in memory controller as well as the Hyper-transport, allows the Opteron processor to achieve lower latency and therefore, greater speed. The single core 130nm Sledgehammer Opteron cache is composed of Level 1 and 2 caches. The Level 1 size is 128KB, 64KB are for data and 64KB are for instructions and the Level 2 cache is 1024KB in

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