AMD Smart Fetch Technology

Smart Fetch Technology allows cores to enter a "halt" state during idle processing times, causing them to draw less power. Before entering the halt state, data from the L1 and L2 caches are transferred to the shared L3 cache so that the contents of the idle cores can be retrieved.

Enhanced AMD PowerNow! Technology

Native quad-core technology enables enhancements to AMD PowerNow! Technology across all four cores. Two power management enhancements—Independent Dynamic Core Technology and Dual Dynamic Power Management™—provide optimum performance-per-watt and power savings.

Independent Dynamic Core Technology

AMD’s Independent Dynamic Core Technology allows each core to independently adjust its frequency to reduce power use based on application requirements (Figure 4). This enables more precise power management, which can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a data center.

Figure 4. Independently controlled cores reduce power use. The voltage is locked to the core with the highest P-state.

Dual Dynamic Power Management

Dual Dynamic Power Management provides separate (split) power planes for the cores and memory controller. This can reduce idle power consumption and allow individual processors to be managed in multi-socket systems, thereby creating power-saving opportunities without compromising performance.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing

Rapid Virtualization Indexing is an innovation in AMD-V technology that reduces the overhead associated with software virtualization. With software virtualization, processor overhead increases as each guest OS and application vies for the host machine’s physical resources; this results in decreased performance. Also, memory latency increases as the virtual machine monitor, or hypervisor, dynamically translates the memory addresses sent to and received from the memory controller. The hypervisor does this so that each guest application does not realize that it is being virtualized. The translation from virtual machine memory address to host machine physical address is achieved by using “shadow page tables” (Figure 5).

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