The AMD 10h processor family - also known as K10 - has 20 key features. We will put them all on paper for you. Some of them are known, but some of them are not. Let's list them.

First of all, the K10 has an integrated DDR2 memory controller with memory prefatcher and the K10 core has 64kb of L1 instruction cache + 64 KB data cache. It also has on chip L2 and L3 cache and this varies depending on the core. The Barcelona / Agena quad core K10 for example has 4x512 KB L2 and 2 MB of L3 cache. K10 supports 32 Byte instruction fetch, instruction precode and branch prediction during cache line files, decoupled decode / execution code, 3-way AMD64 instruction decoding, sideband stack optimiser, dynamic scheduling and speculative execution.

The new core also features 3-way integer execution and address generation, 3-way 128 bit wide floating point executions, Enhanced 3Dnow! Marchitecture, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 & SSE4A Single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction extensions.

Further the CPU can cope with advanced bit manipulation instructions, super forwarding, prefetch into L1 data cache, deep out of order integer & floating point execution, 8 additional XMM registers (SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4A) & 8 additional GPRs in 64 Bit mode.

Last but not the least is Enhanced HyperTransport marchitecture. If this is too much for you don’t worry, it is too much for most of us, but we like that the K10 supports SSE4A so it might have a fighting chance in encoding.