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Concept
Athlon 64 X2
Summary
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first native dual-core desktop central processing unit (CPU) designed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It was designed from scratch as native dual-core by using an already multi-CPU enabled Athlon 64, joining it with another functional core on one die, and connecting both via a shared dual-channel memory controller/north bridge and additional control logic. The initial versions are based on the E stepping model of the Athlon 64 and, depending on the model, have either 512 or 1024 KB of L2 cache per core. The Athlon 64 X2 can decode instructions for Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3), except those few specific to Intel's architecture. The first Athlon 64 X2 CPUs were released in May 2005, in the same month as Intel's first dual-core processor, the Pentium D.
In June 2007, AMD released low-voltage variants of their low-end 65 nm Athlon 64 X2, named "Athlon X2". The Athlon X2 processors feature reduced thermal design power (TDP) of 45 Watt (W). The name was also used for K10 based budget CPUs with two cores deactivated.
The primary benefit of dual-core processors (like the Athlon 64 X2) over single-core processors is their ability to process more software threads at the same time. The ability of processors to execute multiple threads simultaneously is called thread-level parallelism (TLP). By placing two cores on the same die, the X2 effectively doubles the TLP over a single-core Athlon 64 of the same speed. The need for TLP processing ability depends on the situation to a great degree, and some situations benefit from it far more than others. Some programs are currently written for only one thread, and thus cannot use the processing power of a second core.
Programs often written with multiple threads and able to use dual-cores include many music and video encoding applications, and especially professional rendering programs. High TLP applications currently correspond to server and workstation situations more than the typical desktop. These applications can reach almost twice the performance of a single-core Athlon 64 of the same specifications.
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