AMD 10h

On November 30, 2006, AMD live demonstrated the native quad core chip known as "Barcelona" for the first time in public,[9] while running Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition.

[10] On January 24, 2007, AMD Executive Vice President Randy Allen claimed that in live tests, in regard to a wide variety of workloads, "Barcelona" was able to demonstrate 40% performance advantage over the comparable Intel Xeon codenamed Clovertown dual-processor (2P) quad-core processors.

The system was also demonstrated real-time converting a 720p video clip into another undisclosed format while all 8 cores were maxed at 100% by other tasks.

[13] On the December 2006 analyst day, Executive vice president Marty Seyer announced a new mobile core codenamed Griffin launched in 2008 with inherited power optimizations technologies from the K10 microarchitecture, but based on a K8 design.

In November 2007 AMD stopped delivery of Barcelona processors after a bug in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) of stepping B2 was discovered that could rarely lead to a race condition and thus a system lockup.

[14] A patch in BIOS or software worked around the bug by disabling cache for page tables, but it was connected to a 5 to 20% performance penalty.

Characteristics of the microarchitecture include the following:[18] APU features table AMD released a limited edition Deneb-based processor to extreme overclockers and partners.

The "42" officially represents four cores running at 2 GHz, but is also a reference to the answer to life, the universe, and everything from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[25] The first generation desktop APUs based on the K10 microarchitecture were released in 2011 (some models do not provide graphics capability, such as the Lynx Athlon II and Sempron X2).