AMD K9

This article is about the AMD internal project for dual-core processor microarchitecture. For actual dual-core processor products, see Athlon 64 X2. For other uses, see K9.

The AMD K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD designed to replace the K8 processors, featuring dual-core processing.

K9

General information
Common manufacturer	AMD
Architecture and classification
Instruction set	AMD64 (x86-64)
History
Predecessor	K8 - SledgeHammer
Successor	AMD K10

Development

K9 appears originally to have been an ambitious 8 issue per clock cycle core redesign of the K7 or the K8 processor core.^[1] At one point, K9 was the Greyhound project at AMD, and was worked on by the K7 design team beginning in early 2001, with tape-out revision A0 scheduled for 2003. The L1 instruction cache was said to hold decoded instructions, essentially the same as Intel's trace cache.

The existence of a massively parallel CPU design concept for heavily multi threaded applications has also been revealed, as a planned successor to K8. This was reportedly canceled in the conceptualization phase, after about 6 months' work.^[2]

At one time K9 was the internal codename for the dual-core AMD64 processors as the brand Athlon 64 X2;^[3][4] however, AMD has distanced itself from the old K series naming convention, and now seeks to talk about a portfolio of products tailored to different markets.^[5]