Opening the Kimono: Intel Details Nehalem and Tempts with Larrabee

jmke · 18th March 2008, 16:14

Nehalem allows for 33% more micro-ops in flight compared to Penryn (128 micro-ops vs. 96 in Penryn), this increase was achieved by simply increasing the size of the re-order window and other such buffers throughout the pipeline.

With more micro-ops in flight, Nehalem can extract greater instruction level parallelism (ILP) as well as support an increase in micro-ops thanks to each core now handling micro-ops from two threads at once.

Despite the increase in ability to support more micro-ops in flight, there have been no significant changes to the decoder or front end of Nehalem. Nehalem is still fundamentally the same 4-issue design we saw introduced with the first Core 2 microprocessors. The next time we'll see a re-evaluation of this front end will most likely be 2 years from now with the 32nm "tock" processor, codenamed Sandy Bridge.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=3264

18th March 2008, 16:14	#1
jmke Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium Posts: 79,021	Opening the Kimono: Intel Details Nehalem and Tempts with Larrabee Nehalem allows for 33% more micro-ops in flight compared to Penryn (128 micro-ops vs. 96 in Penryn), this increase was achieved by simply increasing the size of the re-order window and other such buffers throughout the pipeline. With more micro-ops in flight, Nehalem can extract greater instruction level parallelism (ILP) as well as support an increase in micro-ops thanks to each core now handling micro-ops from two threads at once. Despite the increase in ability to support more micro-ops in flight, there have been no significant changes to the decoder or front end of Nehalem. Nehalem is still fundamentally the same 4-issue design we saw introduced with the first Core 2 microprocessors. The next time we'll see a re-evaluation of this front end will most likely be 2 years from now with the 32nm "tock" processor, codenamed Sandy Bridge. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=3264 __________________