Software Optimization Guide for AMD64 Processors

25112 Rev. 3.06 September 2005

Topic

Page

 

 

Load-Store Unit

258

 

 

L2 Cache

259

 

 

Write-combining

260

 

 

Buses for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ Processor

260

 

 

Integrated Memory Controller

260

 

 

HyperTransport™ Technology Interface

260

 

 

A.1 Key Microarchitecture Features

The AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Opteron processors include many features designed to improve software performance. The internal design, or microarchitecture, of these processors provides the

following key features:

•Integrated DDR memory controller

•64-Kbyte L1 instruction cache and 64-Kbyte L1 data cache

•On-chip L2 cache

•Instruction predecode and branch prediction during cache-line fills

•Decoupled decode/execution core

•Three-way AMD64 instruction decoding

•Dynamic scheduling and speculative execution

•Three-way integer execution

•Three-way address generation

•Three-way floating-point execution

•3DNow!™ technology, MMX™, SSE, and SSE2 single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) instruction extensions

•Superforwarding

•Deep out-of-order integer and floating-point execution

•In 64-bit mode, eight additional XMM registers (for use with SSE and SSE2 instructions) and eight additional general-purpose registers (GPRs)

•HyperTransport™ technology

250

Microarchitecture for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ Processors Appendix A

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AMD 250 manual Key Microarchitecture Features