AMD’s next-generation Star supports DDR2-1066 & SSE4A

In the 4-year life time, AMD’s K8 processors have put AMD to its high. Not until the launch of Intel Core processors, these K8 processors were said to be the leader of performance. Of course, AMD is unwilling to pass the leading position to Intel. In the fore coming Q3 2007, AMD’s next-generation Star processors will be put into the market and fight with Intel’s Core. To prepare this war, besides the improvement of its microarchitecture, AMD is persuading JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) to put DDR2-1066 as the standard, letting the faster memory be officially supported in Star.

The new Star family includes quad-core Agena, mainstream dual-core Kuma, entry dual core Rana, and single-core Spica. In addition, the old K8 architecture has been renamed to Cities. The new Star microarchitecture has lots of improvements includes : Hyper-Transport 3.0 (from 2GT/s to 5.2GT/s), 32B Instruction Fetch, more precise Branch Prediction and Out-of-Order Load Execution, 4 Double Precision FLOPS/Cycle, Dual 128Bit SSE calculation, and Load per Cycle. At the same clock speed, the new microarchitecture would further push the performance to another high. It should be noted that AM2+ and AM2 is compatible to each other. For example, Altair can work in the existing Socket AM2 main board, the only need is BIOS upgrade. Yet Hyper-Transport will get only 2GHz in Socket AM2 main board as ver. 2.0. Furthermore, AM2+ main board is also designed to support AM3, according to AMD’s AM2r2 specification.

In the previous plan, AM3 processors with build-in DDR2/3 memory controller are the direct successor of the existing AM2 processors. Yet AMD has decided to postpone AM3 as they reviewed the market trend of DDR3 memory, estimated that DDR3 will only be put into common until 2009. The decision is good to both consumers and AMD, such that AMD can simplify its design to lower the cost as well as making more time to AMD to prepare the upcoming DDR3 era.

So far, JEDEC has only recognized DDR2-800 as the highest standard of DDR2, DDR3 would be the next-generation high-speed memory. Regarding with the memory performance, DDR2-800 seems too weak to compete with DDR3-1066 which supported by the upcoming Intel’s Beaelake platform. For this reason, AMD is persuading JEDEC to also put DDR2-1066 as the standard, letting the faster memory can be officially and natively supported in Star.

Regarding with the 48 SSE4 to be added into Intel’s next-generation 45nm products, AMD has announced last week that Star will have SSE4A, a derivative edition of SSE4 in which those Intel 64 instructions are not available. Instructions include graphic, video encoding, 3D calculation, multimedia related are all compatible in Star.

In the first quarter of its launch, AMD estimated that Star would share 10% of the total shipment for entry and above market. When single-core Rana is released in Q4 2007, this figure rise to a double of 20%; while in Q1 2008, Star would increase to 60%, crossing over with the old models.