Intel Developer Forum - Fall 2001: CPU Report

A little on Banias

As you may already know, the Intel Timna design team out of Israel has been working on an entirely new microprocessor known as Banias. Banias has been designed from the ground up to be a low power, high-performance solution primarily targeted at the mobile market.

Intel revealed a bit about how the Banias achieves its low power and high performance characteristics.

One of the most common ways of reducing power with mobile CPUs is by clock gating. The idea of clock gating is simple; areas/units of the CPU that aren't being used are powered down. According to Intel, Banias will have even more aggressive clock gating enabling many more areas of the CPU to be powered down when not being utilized.

When AMD released the Palomino core they claimed a 20% decrease in power consumption by use of more specialized transistors and design optimizations; the Banias processor implements similar transistor choice and sizing techniques but on a much more extreme level.

The final architectural feature of Banias that was discussed today was what Intel calls "Micro Ops Fusion." You'll remember from our previous explanations that Micro Ops are the decoded instructions that the CPU's execution units actually work with. Micro Ops Fusion takes these Micro Ops and combines them to be executed in a much more resourceful fashion. The goal of Micro Ops Fusion is to make more efficient use of the execution units which is actually a goal of another Intel technology introduced today.

The end result of Micro Ops Fusion is an increased number of Instructions (Processed) Per Clock (IPC).