K9

K9 or K-9 may refer to:

Dogs

Fictional dogs

Computing

Entertainment

K-9 (Doctor Who)

K-9 is the name of several fictional robotic canines (dogs, the name being a pun on the pronunciation of "canine") in the long-running British science fiction television series, Doctor Who, first appearing in 1977. K-9 has also been a central character in three of the series television spin-offs: the one-off K-9 and Company (1981), The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–2011) and K-9 (2009–2010). Although not originally intended to be a recurring character in the series, K-9 was kept in the show following his first appearance because he was expected to be popular with younger audiences. There have been at least four separate K-9 units in the series, with the first two being companions of the Fourth Doctor. Voice actor John Leeson has provided the character's voice in most of his appearances, except during Season 17 of Doctor Who, in which David Brierley temporarily did so. The character was created by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, to whom rights to the character still belong; consequently, Baker's spin-off series K-9, which is not BBC-produced, cannot directly reference events or characters from Doctor Who, though it attempts to be a part of that continuity.

AMD K9

The AMD K9 represents a microarchitecture by AMD designed to replace the K8 processors, featuring dual-core processing.

Development

K9 appears originally to have been an ambitious 8 issue per clock cycle core redesign of the K7 or the K8 processor core. At one point, K9 was the Greyhound project at AMD, and was worked on by the K7 design team beginning in early 2001, with tape-out revision A0 scheduled for 2003. The L1 instruction cache was said to hold decoded instructions, essentially the same as Intel's trace cache.

The existence of a massively parallel CPU design concept for heavily multi threaded applications has also been revealed, as a planned successor to K8. This was reportedly canceled in the conceptualization phase, after about 6 months' work.

At one time K9 was the internal codename for the dual-core AMD64 processors as the brand Athlon 64 X2, however AMD has distanced itself from the old K series naming convention, and now seeks to talk about a portfolio of products, tailored to different markets.