AMD explores Barcelona quad-core in more detail

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Apr 2007 at 17:10

Talking of playing with individual cores, Amato coyly flagged the potential appeal of the chip for overclockers, with the ability to tweak the clock speeds of the separate cores, while stressing his official AMD stance that such tweaking would be at the owner's own risk.

More details of the equivalent desktop and mobile chips were promised for September.

Why is K10 the successor the K8 Rev F core? Amato explained that the transition from 90 to 65nm process technology implicitly represented a 'K9' and that rather than the use the engineering reference K8L (to signify lower power requirements), AMD marketeers chose to highlight the changes in the core, with the designation K10.

Back in December 2006 demonstrated (AMD goes native with quad-core demo 99333) its 'Barcelona' native quad-core x86 server processor at its annual AMD Industry Analyst Forum. The company had just unveiled the dual-CPU Quad FX platform, which comprises a pair of dual-core FX-70 parts and was AMD's response to the Intel Core 2 QX6700 Extreme CPUs.