AMD to switch from city to star core naming scheme

Soon we can expect the 65nm Brisbane and Windsor FX processors from AMD. But the CPU firm also has a few other things for the future.

AMD is planning to incorporate a change to its naming scheme for processor cores. Currently the company uses city names like Brisbane, Toledo, San Diego, Paris, etc. The new scheme will use star names:

The Stars family includes the upcoming Agena FX, Agena, Kuma, Rana and Spica cores. AMD will be introducing plenty of architectural changes with the upcoming Stars family. Stars family processors will switch over to AMD’s previously announced HyperTransport 3.0 architecture. While Stars family processors use the HyperTransport 3.0 protocol, it will be backwards compatible with HyperTransport 1.0 systems.

The new version of HyperTransport will allow the CPU and north bridge to work at different frequencies and will double the amount of bandwidth between these two chips.

In addition to HyperTransport 3.0, Stars family processors feature a 128-bit floating point unit for each CPU core, DDR2-1066 support, SSE4A instructions and a split power plane. Split power planes allow the processor and internal north bridge to operate at different voltages and speeds. The advantages of split power planes are it allows the north bridge speed and voltage to never change during Cool’n’Quiet power saving measures. With split power planes the Stars processors require separate PLLs for the processor and internal north bridge.

The first quad-core Starts processor is expected in the third quarter of next year. Read more about AMD's plans at DailyTech.