Original 45nm Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture

  Section 2 of 15  

Improvements in the Intel® Core™2 Processor Family Architecture and Microarchitecture

INTRODUCTION

The family of processors is the latest production version of the Intel® Core™2 and Intel Xeon® product lines implemented on Intel's 45nm Hi-k silicon process. The microarchitecture is based on the 65nm Intel® Core™2 microarchitecture (codename Merom) . A significant component of the value proposition was the addition of architectural and microarchitectural performance enhancements above the expected conversion to 45nm, so there was a strong desire to improve the performance of the architecture over that of its predecessor, the 65nm Intel Core™2 microarchitecture. There are many techniques to improve performance on a microprocessor, and each brings its own value to the final result. In this paper, we examine various architectural and microarchitectural changes that were used to attain the goal of improved performance. The majority of the performance improvements achieve a performance benefit on existing binaries, while the SSE4.1 changes require software changes to enable the added performance. A detailed discussion of the tradeoffs leading to these changes and the performance evaluation are documented in “45nm Core 2 Silicon Performance Enhancements” [1] . In this paper we focus on actual changes that led to a successful result.

  Section 2 of 15  

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