Intel's Atom Architecture: The Journey Begins
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 2, 2008 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
It Does Multiple Threads Though: The Case for SMT
Despite being 2-issue, it's not always easy to execute two instructions from a single thread in parallel due to data dependencies between the two. Intel's solution to this problem was to enable SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) on Atom (not all models unfortunately) to allow the concurrent execution of up to two threads. Welcome the return of Hyper Threading.
Remember the rule of thumb for power/performance tradeoffs? Intel's decision to enable SMT on Atom was the perfect example of just that. SMT increased power consumption by less than 20% on Atom, however it also yielded a 30 - 50% increase in performance on the in-order core. The decision couldn't be easier.
The Atom has a 32-entry instruction scheduling queue, but when running with SMT enabled each thread has its own 16-entry queue. The scheduler doesn't have to switch between threads each clock, it can do so intelligently, the only limitation is that it can only dispatch 2 ops per clock (since it is a 2-wide machine). If one thread is waiting on data to complete an instruction, on the next clock tick the scheduler can choose to dispatch an op from a separate thread that will hopefully be able to execute.
Making Atom multithreaded made perfect sense from a logical standpoint. The downside to an in-order core is that if there is an instruction that is waiting on data to begin execution the rest of the pipeline stalls while that dependency is resolved. The chances that you'll have two independent instructions from two independent threads both with misses in cache is highly unlikely.
Execution Units
Atom isn't a superwide processor, with an in-order front end and no on-die memory controller it's unlikely that we'll see tremendous instruction throughput. Data dependencies would do a good job of ensuring that tons of execution units remain idle, so Atom's designers did their best to only include the bare minimum when it came to execution units.
There's no dedicated integer multiplier or divider, these functions are shared with the SIMD FP units. There are two SSE units and the scheduler can dispatch either a float or an integer SIMD op to both ports in a given clock.
All of the functional units are 64-bits wide with the exception of supporting full width SIMD integer and single precision FP ADDs.
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highlandsun - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
With all due respect to Fred Weber, with Atom at 47 million transistors, it's pretty obvious that the 10% figure for X86 ISA compatibility is not negligible, particularly in this performance-at-absolute-minimum-power space. Anybody using X86 in tiny embedded systems is automatically giving up a chunk of their power budget that someone using a cleaner instruction set encoding can apply directly to useful work. And as the previous poster already pointed out - source code portability is the only thing that matters to application developers, and that's a non-problem these days. Using the X86 instruction set encoding is stupid. Using it on a low-power-budget device is suicide.Jovec - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
I don't think the 10% reference meant 10% of all chips, but rather 10% of the current chip at the time the statement was made. In other words, x86 instruction decoding requires (roughly) a fixed amount of transistors for any chip, so the smaller the die size and larger the transistor count, less and less space is devoted to it.highlandsun - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
Yes, that's obvious. And it's also obvious that Atom at 47 million transistors is paying a greater proportionate cost than Core2 Duo at 410 million transistors. In 2002 when Fred made that statement, AMD's current chip was the AthlonXP Thoroughbred, with about 37 million transistors. At the same time the Pentium 4 had 55 million. Put in context, I'd guess that the Atom at 47M vs P4 at 55M has more than 10% of its resources devoted to X86 decoding.Also, Fred's statement in 2002 didn't take into account the additional complexity introduced by the AMD64 instruction extensions, where now a single instruction may be anywhere from 1 to 16 bytes long. Given that you're doing a completely clean ground-up chip design in the first place, it would have made more sense (from both a power budget and real estate perspective) to design a clean, orthogonal, uniform-length encoding at the same time.
Cross-platform ABI compatibility is stupid in the context they're aiming for; nobody is going to run their PC version of Crysis or MSWord on their cellphone. All that matters is API compatibility. With a consistent API, you can still run a separate binary translator if you really really want to move a desktop app to your mobile device but in most cases it would be a bad idea because a desktop app is unlikely to take advantage of power-saving APIs that would be important on a mobile. I.e., most of the time you're going to want purpose-built mobile apps anyway.
floxem - Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - link
I agree. But it's Intel. What do you expect?maree - Thursday, April 3, 2008 - link
I dont think MS will be ready before Windows 7 is released, which is another 3-5 years... and might coincide with Moorestown. Microsoft started work on WindowsLite only after releasing Vista. Vista is bloatware as of now. As of now MS has to rely on crippled versions of XP and Vista like starter and home, which is not very ideal.Apple and Linux are going to have a free run till then...
TA152H - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
Bringing up the Pentium is a little strange, because the whole market is completely different.The Pentium wasn't supposed to be for everyone when it came out. The processor market was different back then where previous generations lasted a long, long time. The Pentium wasn't supposed to replace the 486 right away, or even quickly, and being huge and a terrible power hog was acceptable because the initial iteration was just for a very small group of people who absolutely needed it. The original Pentium had a lot of problems, and struggled badly to reach 66 MHz, so they sold most of their processors at 60 MHz. The second generation was intended more for mainstream.
Nowadays the latest generation replaces the earlier much more quickly, and has to cover more market segments more quickly. I still remember IBM releasing new machines for the 8086 in 1987. That's 9 years after the chip was made. It's just a different market.
The Pentium is nothing like the Silverthorne though, and it's a strange comparison. The Pentium executed x86 instructions, it wasn't decoupled. It also had both pipes, the U and V, lockstepped, which is limitation the Silverthorne doesn't have.
Saying the Pentium Pro was the first processor that allowed out of order processing is strange indeed. The only other processor this would have made sense with was the Pentium, since it was the only previous processor that was superscalar. So, they only made one in order processor, and then went to out of order with the next. It's difficult to see the extrapolation from this that it will be five years or more before Silverthorne goes out of order. It might be that long, but the backwards reference shouldn't be used to back that; it does more to contradict it.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
The Pentium reference was merely to show that what was once a huge, 300mm^2 design could now be built on a much, much smaller scale. And starting from scratch it's now possible to build something in-order that's significantly faster.The Pentium was an obvious comparison given that it was Intel's last two-issue in-order design, but I didn't mean to imply anything beyond that.
It won't be too long before we'll be able to have something the speed of a Core 2 in a similarly small/cool running package as well :)
Take care,
Anand
fitten - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I remember back in the days of the Mac FX we talked about 'what ifs' like making a 6502 with the (then) modern process technologies and how fast would it run. I wonder what about now :)crimson117 - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
I am SO going to hold you to that! But I can only hope "won't be long" will mean within 12 months rather than within 12 years :P
Especially after my fiasco mounting a Freezer 7 Pro on an Abit IP35-E, I'd love if a heatsink weren't even necessary.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
12 months won't be a reality unfortunately :) But look at it this way, the first Pentium M came out in 2003? And 5 years later we're able to have somewhat comparable performance with the Atom processor.I'm really curious to see what happens with Atom on 32nm...