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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Betwon - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
Without branch prediction, K8 will become very very poor. Too terrible!The prediction is much better than the forever penalty.
The penalty of disprediction is just the penalty of doing nothing.(don't predict)
The penalty is fairly high. If you are against the prediction, you will find that the penalty will happen in K8 every 3 instructions averagely. K8@1.8G(without branch predictor ) will fail to win the old Pentium3@1G(with branch predictor ).
This is the drawback of lack of prediction, whether branches or memory access: It can not speeds up anything, but often slows down.
Without branch prediction, K8 will be down!
Betwon - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
It is very interesting that the P4's Load/store/Memory reordering method, which is very different with Core's.For P4, it always assumes that all load-ops can hit and find the load data from the store buffer or L1 data cache.
Before one load-op is executed, it has to obtain the load address and all prior-store address and compare with them. If it is found that the load address is equal to one prior-store address, the load-op will assume that the store data is in the store buffer and the data has been ready and vaild, then start to execute speculatively.
If the address-euqal is not found, the load-op will assume that the load data is in L1 data cache, and the data is ready and vaild, then start to execute speculatively.
If the speculation fail or the miss happen, the speculative load-op and the relative speculative micro-ops have to be reexecuted -- it is called as 'replay'.
The load-op can be executed speculatively, after it knew it's load address and compared the load address with the all prior-store address.
The load-op can not be executed speculatively before it knew it's load address and compared the load address with the all prior-store address.
The load-op speculates whether the load data is ready and vaild, but not speculate whether there is the true dependency with prior-store.
But Core can speculate whether there is the true dependency with prior-store. Core has the smart predictor which can predict the store-to-load dependency precisely, before the load-op address is compared with the prior-store address.
Betwon - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
If you really want to know what is the Intel's load reordering and memory misambiguation, I can tell you the facts:http://www.stanford.edu/~merez/papers/LoadSched_IS...">http://www.stanford.edu/~merez/papers/LoadSched_IS...
Speculation Techniques for Improving Load Related Instruction Scheduling 1999
Adi Yoaz, Mattan Erez, Ronny Ronen, and Stephan Jourdan -- From Intel's Haifa, they designed the Load/Store Unit of Core.
I had said that anandtech should study many things about CPU. Of course, I should study more things about CPU.
Betwon - Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - link
sub ebp,ebpmov ecx, 1000000000
B1:
mov eax,[ebx]
sub esi,1
sub edi,1
cmp ecx,ebp
je B2
mov edx,[ebx]
sub esi,1
sub edi,1
cmp ecx,ebp
je B2
mov eax,[ebx]
sub esi,1
sub edi,1
cmp ecx,ebp
je B2
mov edx,[ebx]
sub esi,1
sub edi,1
cmp ecx,ebp
je B2
mov eax,[ebx]
sub esi,1
sub edi,1
cmp ecx,ebp
je B2
mov edx,[ebx]
sub ecx,1
sub edi,1
cmp ebp,ebp
je B1
B2:
If the asm codes take 6000000000 cycles --> up to five x86 instructions at a time.
It is so easy to verify.
we can not call K5 -- 4 decoders, because it is too immature.
emboss - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
I'm not even sure the Core architecture has 4 decoders. There's lots of references in the Intel Optimisation manual to say that there's still only three (two simple + one complex):"On Intel Core Solo and Intel Core Duo processors, decoding of most packed SSE instructions is done by all three decoders. As a result the front end can process up to three packed SSE instructions every cycle." (page 1-32)
"Improvement in decoder and micro-op fusion allows the front end to see most instructions as single µop instructions. This increases the throughput of the three decoders in the front end." (page 1-31)
While it certainly wouldn't be the first time Intel manuals have been wrong, they're usually reasonably accurate.
Also from the optimisation manual, it implies that the front end/decoder doing the fusion (for example, see the second quote above).
JarredWalton - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Not sure if you're referring to Core Solo/Duo manuals or to Core "Conroe/Merom" manuals. The article is covering the *next* Core architecture, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if Core Duo only has 3 decoders while Conroe bumps that to 4.emboss - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Oops, yes, my mistake. I was referring to Solo/Duo. Damn those marketers :)This still leaves me puzzled over the unexpected SSE performance on Solo/Duo. Thinking about it a bit more, the performance would have been 4x "expected" (single uop SSE with two FADD units vs double uop SSE with only one FADD unit), whereas I was only getting a bit less than double. Gnah, back to emperical optimisation.
Furen - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Yes, Yonah only has 3 decoders (and the same port arrangement as Dothan, too).Loki726 - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Great job Johan!Its articles like this that keep anandtech head and shoulders above everyone else. Instead of just running the latest and greatest core you get through the same old benchmarks and throwing some pretty comparison graphs at the reader, you actually take the time to figure out what parts of the architecture contribute to the performance you see in benchmarks. Keep it up!
On a small side note, on your first figure of intel's core architecture on page 4, I think the cache size should be 4096kb. 4gb seems rather large...
Goi - Monday, May 1, 2006 - link
Nice read. Did you get all your information solely from Jack Doweck, or are there papers outlining the Core architecture. I've read those for the Pentium-M and Netburst architecture(as well as several other architectures) but I haven't seen one of the Core yet.