AMD's adaptive cores

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The reindeer games are in full swing at ISSCC. Following Intel’s discussions on Sunday about technologies in its TFLOPS chip AMD is talking about Barcelona.

It’s release today highlighted power and thermal management features in the forthcoming quad-core line:

AMD’s redesigned microarchitecture will enable new power- and thermal-management techniques, strengthening the industry-leading performance-per-watt AMD Opteron processors currently deliver today. Among the new features are enhancements to AMD PowerNow!™ technology for dynamic adjustment of individual core frequencies.

Barcelona chips also include features that power down memory logic when not in use along with clock gating to shut down areas of the chip not in use.

Upcoming native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are designed for the same power infrastructure AMD customers depend on today – 68, 95 and 120 Watt thermal envelopes.