K10 adds the capability of independently clocking all the CPU cores. In current K8 processors (and Intel's Core 2 generation), all cores are clocked at the same level all the time -- the P-state can only be changed synchronously. In case of a compute-intensive single-threaded process, all cores must run on the highest level P-state. On K10-based CPUs, the idle cores could be switched to the lowest P-state, while others are in different states, depending on load.
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