AMD planning K9 processor in 2005

The Chief Technology Officer from AMD, Fred Weber, confirmed that AMD his K9 processor is planned for somewhere in the year 2005 :

It was indicated that the first samples of AMD K9 will be released in the second half of 2005, 3.5 years after the AMD showcased its early K8 processors. Historically it took about three to four years to develop a micro-architecture of a desktop microprocessor, but the first indications of the K9 product development start belong to March 2003, right after the Opteron went into mass-production. Today’s claim of Mr. Weber points toward a tight schedule for AMD K9 development process. AMD is looking at adding multi-threading pattern into its future microprocessors in order to improve overall performance, it transpired, but Fred Weber declined to confirm if any real decision has been made on the matter. He added that multi-core design would give a more substantial speed bump compared to that brought by technologies similar with Intel’s Hyper-Threading.

Other companies like Intel, IBM and Sun are also planning to develop multi-threading technologies in their future processors. Because of this X-bit Labs thinks that AMD might add this feature in his K9s because it is a cost-effective way to gain performance.

It is interesting to note that during AMD Athlon 64 launch in late September AMD confirmed that the first dual-core AMD Opteron processors featuring AMD64 aka x86-64 technology would be manufactured using 90nm SOI technology in 2005 (see this and this news-stories). In the same year, AMD starts transition to 65nm fabrication process, it was indicated.

Much more about AMD his future CPUs is not known.



Source : X-bit Labs