AMD64 Processors

Processors are the core of any desktop computers, laptops or any kind of electronically driven devices. But in case of computers it gets more importance than others. Different types and qualities of processors are available in the market. AMD64 is one of the renowned ones.

AMD64 provides 64 bits general purpose registers and it helps in working conveniently with larger data as X86-64 does. AMD renamed their processor as AMD64 in 2003 after the architecture named 'X86-64' was launched. With the opposition to Intel IA-64 which was also a 64 bit processor, AMD positioned the AMD64 architecture for the addition of 64 bit computing compatibilities.

The Opteron was the first processor based on AMD64. It was released in April, 2003.

The versions, where the instruction set of AMD64 is implemented are Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon II, Athlon X2, Opteron, Phenom, Phenom II, Turion 64, Turion 64 X2, and then on Sempron processors.

In case of architectural features AMD64 introduces 64bit arithmetic operations and logical operations, 64bit virtual addresses and stated earlier about the general-purpose processor registers. AMD64 processors include some developed features like 64 bit integer capability which has made many operations easier than that was in 32bit. As the size of general purpose registers has been increased, the number of this registers has also been increased from 8 to 16 and it helps to keep more frequent data of large number with fast processing system.

The number of 128bit XMM registers has also been increased from 8 to 16. Besides it provides with large virtual address space. With the development of the current version this space will be increasing in future. The AMD64 has got large physical address space too. The original implementation can address up to 1TB (2^40 bytes) of RAM. But now, the current version with 48bit physical addresses can address up to 256TB of RAM.

AMD64 supports Physical Address Extension (PAE) mode, when operating in legacy mode. This processor extends the physical address extension from 36bits to 52bits of physical address.

The original AMD64 had the Intel's SSE and SSE2 as core instructions. Later the SSE3 was adopted in 2005. The older features that were in AMDs' were removed and replaced with more developed features in AMD64.

Current AMD64 implementations depend on both the operating system you are running and the specifications of RAM. The limitation of the virtual address space can also be occurred by the operating system and if you got large amount of RAM installed than it would allow the OS to keep more data in RAM. This results in the improvement of performance.

The AMD64 are implemented by the following processors-

  • AMD Athlon 64
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2
  • AMD Athlon 64 FX
  • AMD Athlon II
  • AMD Opteron
  • AMD Turion 64
  • AMD Turion 64 X2
  • AMD Sempron
  • AMD Phenom
  • AMD Phenom II
  • AMD Bulldozer (microarchitecture) FX.