The AMD Opteron Northbridge Architecture

Abstract

To increase performance while operating within a fixed power budget, the AMD opteron processor integrates multiple times86-64 cores with a router and memory controller. AMD's experience with building a wide variety of system topologies using Opteron's hypertransport-based processor interface has provided useful lessons that expose the challenges to be addressed when designing future system interconnect, memory hierarchy, and I/O to scale with both the number of cores and sockets in future times86-64 CMP architectures.