jmke

Other features, including those AMD cites as mobile-specific ones, are familiar from AMD's stated plans for its next-gen quad-core desktop and server CPUs. Those include separate power planes for the two execution cores and the memory controller, the ability to halt one CPU core entirely if it's not needed, and the dynamic link power scaling that is a part of HyperTransport 3.

That sounds an awful lot like the Turion 64 all over again—not that there's anything wrong the Turion or with using a common CPU microarchitecture, as Intel seems to have learned through painful experience. But this talk of mobile-specific designs can get a little thick, so I pressed Hester on this point. He insisted this is a real and separate engineering effort, more so than the Turion. The distinctive mobile optimizations seem to boil down to two elements, one specific and one less so. First, AMD has redesigned the memory controller for lower power use. The Opteron memory controller has a server heritage, he said, and this reworked one will better serve the mobile market (and the desktop market, too, incidentally.) Second, Hester alluded (and this is the less specific bit) to changes in the way power is delivered throughout the chip.

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