The Athlon II P320 is a mobile processor first released by AMD in May 2010. The P320 is based on AMD's K10 processor microarchitecture and supports a variety of modern features designed to enhance processing power and efficiency. The P320 is intended to fill the role of energy efficient budget processor and has generally lower capabilities than most other models in its product family.
Processing Features
The P320 has a relatively slow processor frequency of 2,100 MHz. The other models in the Mobile Athlon II Dual-Core family operate at speeds between 2,000 and 2,500 MHz. The main bus speed of the P320 is rated at 1,600 MHz using a single 16-bit HyperTransport link. This link transfers information between the processor and other components of the computer. All 10 mobile Athlon II processors use this type of data bus.
Design
The P320 is part of the Danube platform, which is designed to work in conjunction with the AMD M880G chipset. This chipset controls a number of on-board functions including on-board video processing using the Radeon HD 4250 graphics chipset. The processor cores of the P320 use a dual-core configuration based on the Champlain core design. The die that these cores are mounted on is designed for motherboards compatible with the S1G4 processor socket.
Memory Support
The Champlain processing core provides support for DDR3 Random Access Memory with a maximum effective speed of 1,066 MHz. Systems using the P320 are limited to using memory at this speed by the memory controller integrated into the processor die. This model also includes two data caches designed to store often accessed instructions and application data for rapid retrieval. The Level 1 data cache uses two pairs of 64 KB caches that are linked to each processor core. The L2 data cache consists of two 512 KB data caches that are also linked to each core.
Instruction Sets
There are two basic types of processor instruction sets used on the P320. Instructions designed to enhance the processing capabilities of the CPU include the MMX, 3DNOW!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a and AMD64 instruction sets. This model also includes Enhanced Virus Protection and Virtualization technology to protect the system from specific types of computer viruses and enhance the performance of virtualization software. The second type of instruction set used on the P320 enables the PowerNow! feature. PowerNow! is designed to increase the energy efficiency of the CPU and allows it to operate with a maximum power draw of 25 Watts, which is 10 Watts lower than the standard models of this family.
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