K10 is AMD’s first quad-core architecture; the firm even speaks of native quad-core and insist that this point be noted. Unlike Intel’s Clovertown architecture, which integrates two dual-core processors in one package, AMD is following the Pentium D; Barcelona integrates the four cores on the same die. Apart from the elegance of this solution, we also note the advantage purely in terms of performance; communication between the four cores is done at the frequency of the CPU.

AMD’s approach is opposite to Intel’s; the Intel technique has the communications between the cores relying on their physical placement on the chip. Cores 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 can communicate quickly and effectively, but as soon as two cores that don’t share the same die must share information they must communicate through the memory controller which, on the Intel architectures, is still integrated with the northbridge.

This relatively simple information exchange generates two requests that pass by the Front Side Bus and so must be carried out at a reduced frequency. While it’s undeniable that the Clovertown is a quad-core processor, the distinction that AMD has made on this level was more a marketing decision than a technical choice: as long as there are 4 cores integrated in one processor there isn’t much room for discussion, the rest is really just details of implementation.

Unlike the previous transition to dual-core processors, this time AMD engineers didn’t stop there, they effectively have a budget of 463 million transistors with which to play one-up in an effort to improve the IPC (Instruction Per Clock) of each of its cores.

These improvements had positive effects on the overall processing pipeline: from the front end which reads and decodes instructions, to the execution units passing by the cache memory and the memory controller; there isn’t one part of the processor that hasn’t been remodelled for the K10 architecture.

AMD even goes so far as thinking that we are now faced with a tenth generation architecture, effectively jumping a stage because the Opteron and Athlon 64 were both eighth generation processors.