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).

K10 architecture
K10 single core with overlay description, excluding the L2 cache array