Athlon 64 and Opteron dual-core explained

One of the more intriguing things about future processors is the move towards multiple cores. It's a feature that some specialist high-end processors have had for a while and it can mean a significant improvement in performance. When AMD launched the Athlon 64, it came as a pleasant surprise that the firm had designed for the possibility of dual-core AMD64 chips from the outset.

Some might consider the inclusion of dual-core capability into an already late design to be over-engineering but the fact that it is there is likely to reap significant rewards for AMD. Modern compilers are aware that cache misses cause a huge performance hit so they try to avoid fetching data from the main memory as much as possible.