Introduction
Wide Dynamic Execution, Advanced Digital Media Boost, Smart Memory Access and Advanced Smart Cache; those are the technologies that according to the marketing people at Intel enable Intel to build the high performance, low energy CPUs using the new Core architecture.Of course, as an AnandTech Reader, you couldn't care less about which Hyper Super Advanced Label the marketing folks glue on their CPUs. "Extend the digital lifestyle by combining robust performance with low power consumption" could have been another marketing claim for the new Core architecture, but VIA already cornered that sentence for its C7 CPUs. The marketing slogans for Intel's Core and VIA's C7 are almost the same; the architectures are however vastly different.
No, let us find out what is really behind all this marketing hyper-talk, and preferably compare it with the AMD "K8" (Athlon 64, Opteron) architecture of Intel's NetBurst and Pentium M processors. That is what this article is all about. We talked to Jack Doweck, the engineer who designed the completely new Memory Reorder Buffer and Memory disambiguation system. Jack Doweck is one of the Intel Israel Development Center (IDC) architects.
The Intel "P8"
Intel marketing states that Core is a blend of P-M techniques and NetBurst architecture. However, Core is clearly a descendant of the Pentium Pro, or the P6 architecture. It is very hard to find anything "Pentium 4" or "NetBurst" in the Core architecture. While talking to Jack Doweck, it became clear that only the prefetching was inspired by experiences with the Pentium 4. Everything else is an evolution of "Yonah" (Core Duo), which was itself an improvement of Dothan and Banias. Those CPUs inherited the bus of the Pentium 4, but are still clearly children of the hugely successful P6 architecture. In a sense, you could call Core the "P8" architecture, with Banias/Dothan being based on the "P7" architecture. (Note that the architecture of Banias/Dothan was never given an official name, so we will refer to it as "P-M" for simplicity's sake.)Of course this doesn't mean that Intel's engineers just bolted a few functional units and a few decoders on Yonah and called it a day. Jack told us that Woodcrest/Conroe/Merom are indeed based on Yonah, but that almost 80% of both the architecture and circuit design had to be redone.
CPU architecture in a nutshell
For those of you who are not so familiar with CPUs, we'll start with a crash course in CPU architectures. To understand CPU design, you must first look at the instructions that are sent to the CPU, and thus we start with the software.Typical x86 software code consists of about 50% stores and loads, and there are about twice as many loads as there are stores. Of the remainder, about 15 to 20% of the instructions are branches (If, Then, Else), and the rest are mostly "ADD" (addition) and "MUL" (multiply) instructions. Only a very small percentage of code consists of more exotic instructions such as DIV (divisions), SQRT (square root), or other higher order math (e.g. trigonometric functions).
All these instructions are processed in a typical "Von Neuman" pipeline: Fetch, Decode, Operand Fetch, Execute, Retire.
Instructions are fetched based on the instruction pointer register, and initially they are nothing but long bit patterns to the CPU. It's only after the CPU starts decoding the bits that the instructions "start to make sense" to the CPU. Addresses and opcodes are decoded out of the instructions, and the addresses are used for the next step: the operand fetch. As you don't want the CPU to perform calculations with the addresses but rather on the content of these addresses - the "operands" - the CPU has to fetch the right data out of the data cache. Once these operands are put in the registers, the ALU is steered by the "opcode" (which has been decoded) to perform the right calculation on the operands in the registers.
The results are written to the architecture register file, the registers which can be used by the compiler. The results must also be written to the caches and the main memory, so that these are also up to date. That is the final phase, the retire phase. That is the basically how processing works in all CPUs.
The main challenge for the CPU designer today is the average memory latency the CPU sees. A Pentium 4 3.6 GHz with DDR-400 runs no less than 18 times faster than the base clock of the RAM (200 MHz). Every cycle the memory is being accessed, a minimum of 18 cycles pass on the CPU. At the same time, it takes several cycles to even send a request, and it takes a few cycles to send a request back. (We discussed this in the past in our overview of memory technology article.) The result is that wait times of 200 to 300 cycles are not uncommon on the Pentium 4. The goal of CPU cache is to avoid accessing RAM, but even if the CPU only has to go to system memory 4% of the time, that 4% of the time can lower performance significantly.
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Missing Ghost - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
hum, no. There is a 1.4gHz P6, you forgot Tualatin.JarredWalton - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
1.26 was Tualatin as well, but that's beside the point. Basically, clock speed at launch vs. final clock speed of the architecture was a disappointment for Intel. They were hoping for 6+ GHz at launch, and even thinking 10 GHz might be possible.KayKay - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Someone should hire you to write textbooks because this was explained extremely well and in simple terms. Good JobJohanAnandtech - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Thanks! :-)Very happy to read that.
BitByBit - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Fantastic article.In retrospect, it is easy to conclude that this is the route Intel should have chosen for P6's retirement.
Core looks to be a very strong, all-round performer, unlike Netburst.
We can only hope that AMD has an answer in the works, as K8 will have a hard time competing with this monster.
It is unreasonable in my mind to expect a 4-5(?) year-old architecture to be able to compete with Intel's latest. AMD with K8 has had a long reign as the performance king, but is now facing something entirely different. Perhaps K8L will be able to offer serious competition.
It will, however, take more than a doubling of the FP units (if rumour is correct) to achieve this. The cumulative effect of Conroe's architectural features (memory disambiguation, macro-ops fusion etc...) mean that Core's efficiency has far exceeded K8's, not to mention the impact of its vastly superior cache system - its 8-way 32kb * 2 L1 should in theory exceed the hitrate of K8's 2-way 64kb * 2 L1.
It may not be until K10 is released that AMD takes back the performance crown.
Larso - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
As the K8 is about 5 years old, and the current incarnations doesn't really include that many modifications, I wonder what AMD's engineers have been doing all these years. The K8 is not that different from the K7 even.Whats coming up? The AM2 version is basically the same beast with a new memory controller. The K8L, well since they didn't name it K9, I suppose its just small upgrades to the same design.
I really like to think AMD has something coming we don't know about. Or rather, they ought to have something coming... Any rumors?
Reynod - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
I can't help but think (and pray) that Larso's comment has some validity here.Why would AMD sit back and do nothing for so long? Would they have not been tinkering with various prototypes over the last couple of years? Are we in for a surprise?? Anand, you and the review team touched on several improvements they could make, care to outline these in some detail in a future article? Someone needs to give AMD some free advice ... heh heh
Spoonbender - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Keep in mind that AMD doesn't have Intel's resources. Until recently, they still lost money every quarter. So they might not have been able to work on a successor to K8 until recently. (I remeber reading an interview with some AMD boss, saying that the K8 was literally a last-ditch effort to survive. If that failed, there wouldn't be an AMD, so they threw everything they had at it)So "Why would AMD sit back and do nothing for so long?" Because they had a good project, and didn't have the resources to make a new one?
Of course, it probably isn't that bad, just tossing out an alternative scenario. ;)
However, they have hinted that they were working on specific architectures for the notebook and server markets. (Unlike Intel who are moving back to a single unified architecture).
And despite its age, the K8 is still a pretty nice architecture, and it wouldn't be a huge undertaking to improve on it to get something quite a bit more efficient. Intel had to develop a new architecture because NetBurst just wouldn't cut it. AMD can probably afford to expand on K8 a bit longer, and even with K9/K10, I wouldn't expect a vastly different architecture.
Spoonbender - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
"Because they had a good project" <- Was supposed to be product, not project... :)psychobriggsy - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
AMD said recently that they have three times the engineers on their books as they did when they designed K8.However I suspect they're working on K10/KX, although maybe some of them worked on K8L.
Clearly it seems that some in-core work could translate into reasonable performance gains for the current K8 design. A 4-way L1 cache instead of 2-way for example, and a greater L2 to L1 bandwidth. Certainly a mechanism to reorder instructions so that loads can be performed earlier seems to be necessary. 2MB L2 per core could also help, and the 65nm die pictures that AMD showed recently did seem to show far denser cache. K8L is rumoured to include more FP resources, but I don't know about any of the other stuff - but AMD will be talking more about K8L (and beyond?) in June apparently.