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Processor Specs
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Pentium 4 Processor Specs
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The above list of processor specifications includes such
aspects as
•CPU Speed, Bus Speed, Manufacturing technology, Stepping,
Cache Size, Package Type
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Some more recent processor spec’s
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Even more recent
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Still even more recnt
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CPU Speed
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CPU Speed
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CPU Speed
• The activities of the processor are kept in sync by
the clock.
• The clock goes through a regular/repetitive action.
In a binary system, a cycle consists of a 1 and a 0
(a high followed by a low).
• The clock is usually a quartz oscillator that is
external to the microprocessor.
• So the CPU speed is not something built into the
chip, but rather the maximum rate at which the
chip can be expected to perform normally.
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CPU Speed (Cont.)
• Sometimes differently rated chips are made
from the same manufacturing process, and
the CPU speed is determined by some
testing after the fact.
• Some people try to operate the processor
faster than the designated rate. This is
known as “overclocking.”
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CPU Speed (Cont.)
• The speed is measured in Hertz, which are
cycles per second.
– KiloHertz, kHz, is thousands (103) of cycles per
second
– MegaHertz, MHz, is millions (106) of cycles
per second
– GigaHertz, GHz, is billions (109) of cycles per
second
– What’s next?
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CPU Speed (Cont.)
• The clock speed is also known as the clock’s
frequency (the number of cycles per second).
• A related quantity is called the period which is the
time required for one cycle (a.k.a. as a clock tick).
• A clock’s frequency and period are reciprocals.
– f = 1/T or T = 1/f, where f is frequency and T is
period
– E.g. a frequency of 60 Hertz (cycles per second)
corresponds to a period of 1/60 = 0.0167 seconds per
cycle
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CPU Speed (Cont.)
• A frequency of 1 kHz [a thousand cycles per second]
corresponds to a period (tick) of 1 millisecond (ms) [a
thousandth (10-3) of a second per cycle].
• A frequency of 1 MHz [a million cycles per second]
corresponds to a period (tick) of 1 microsecond (s) [a
millionth (10-6) of a second per cycle].
• A frequency of 1 GHz [a billion cycles per second]
corresponds to a period (tick) of 1 nanosecond (ns) [a
billionth (10-9) of a second per cycle].
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New to Intel: Turbo Boost
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Turbo Boost
• Instead of having a fixed top speed, the
microprocessor has built in sensors for
current, power usage, and temperature.
• Based on these factors and computational
need, it will push the speed for one or more
cores to its limit.
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Bus Speed
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Bus Speed
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Bus Speed
• There is a hierarchy of buses in a computer, but in
a discussion of processors, the buses of interest are
the front-side bus and the back-side bus.
• In early processors the CPU speed and bus speed
(and thus the speed of interactions with memory,
etc.) were the same. But a bottleneck (the von
Neumann bottleneck) arose because memory
speeds cannot keep up with processor speeds. And
so accessing the memory was holding the
processor back.
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Front-side Bus (FSB)
• The Front-side Bus (a.k.a. the memory bus or
system bus) connects the processor to other parts
via the chipset.
• It allows communication between the processor
and main memory (RAM), the system chipset, PCI
devices, the AGP card, and other peripheral buses.
• When the “bus speed” is given as one of the
processor’s specs it refers to the front-side bus
speed.
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The Northbridge
• A chipset is a simply group of chips that work
together to perform related functions.
• The Northbridge chipset communicates with the
processor (using the FSB) and controls interaction
with memory, the PCI bus, and AGP.
• Northbridge’s partner in the chipset is the
Southbridge. The Southbridge handles the IO
functions.
– The Intel Hub Architecture (IHA) is replacing the
Northbridge/Southbridge chipset.
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Backside Bus
• The back-side bus (a.ka. the cache bus) connects
the processor to L2 cache. The term back-side bus
is reserved for cases in which the L2 cache is
packaged with the microprocessor.
– If the L2 cache is separate from the processor (OLD),
the front-side bus will connect the processor to the
Level 2 cache.
• Cache (SRAM) operates faster than memory
(DRAM). The backside bus operates at faster
speeds than the front-side bus, sometimes it works
at the processor speed.
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FSB Speeds
• The ratio between the CPU speed and bus speed is
a simple fraction.
– For example, a CPU speed of 3.2 GHz and bus speed
of 800 MHz has a ratio of 4.
• With Pentium III’s the 100 and 133 MHz FSB
speeds became standard.
• That rate has been somewhat fixed for a few years
but what is changing is the amount of data
transferred each clock cycle.
• This is where one begins to talk of “DDR” or
“quad-pumped.”
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Edge-triggering
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Edge triggering
• The clock keeps the various circuit elements
working in unison.
• Elements are typically designed to be active on the
“edge” of the clock – either
– when it is rising (the positive edge)
– Or when it is falling (the negative edge)
• More precise than level activation, where the
action takes places when the clock has a certain
state or level (e.g. when the clock is high).
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DDR
• Double Data Rate (DDR) allows data to be
fetched on both the positive and negative
edges of the clock.
– Thus it is essentially the equivalent of doubling
clock rate.
– E.g. a 100MHz DDR transfer equals that of a
200MHz SDR transfer
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Quad pumped
• A quad pumped bus allows four signals to be
communicated per clock cycle. This is sometimes
called QDR (Quad Data Rate).
• Pentium 4’s uses a quad pumped FSB.
– The 400MHz FSB is a 100MHz bus with four signals
per cycle.
– The 533MHz FSB is a quad-pumped 133MHz bus.
• Quad pumping is one of the features of the
Pentium 4 Net-Burst micro-architecture.
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DDR3
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DDR, DDR2, & DDR3
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Intel’s QuickPath
With multiple
cores, now the
chip has a built-in
memory controller
(Integrated
Memory
Controller) per
core and each core
gets assigned part
of the system
memory.
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Manufacturing Technology
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Manufacturing technology
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Manufacturing Technology
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“Tick Tock”
• Intel refers to their progress as “tick-tock”
• Tick is an improvement in manufacturing
technology – a decrease in the component
size (Moore’s Law)
• Tock is a change in the architecture – new
instructions, more controllers, more
registers, etc.
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Manufacturing technology
• The next specification found in the table is
manufacturing technology, which indicates the
size of the components (mainly transistors) which
reflects the number of components that can be
placed on the chip.
• In earlier microprocessors, one used terms like
large-scale integration (LSI), very large-scale
integration (VLSI) and ultra large-scale
integration (ULSI).
– But as Moore’s Law continued to hold true, we ran out
of adjectives.
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Manufacturing Technology
• Today the manufacturing technology is given in
terms of microns or nanometers (e.g. the 0.13micron or the 90-nm technology).
– A nanometer (nm) is a billionth of a meter (10-9 m).
• The same chip may be made using different
technologies, but this is to done to perfect the
newer technology so that more components can be
added to latter chips.
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Intel on the 32nm technology
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Intel on the 22nm technology
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Stepping
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Stepping
• As with software, mistakes (errata) in hardware
are found and revisions are needed. However,
hardware mistakes are more difficult to fix.
• The stepping refers to various fixes, so one wants
a higher stepping which presumably has fewer
bugs.
– AMD uses the term “revision number.”
• The circuitry cannot be changed on an existing
chip, it might be possible to overcome a processor
bug by changing the BIOS which can be changed
(flashed).
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Pentium 4 Product Information
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Document on Specification Update
(Stepping Levels)
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Cache size
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Cache size
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Cache
• Recall that there are three levels of cache
(L1, L2 and L3) associated with the
processor.
• The cache specification on the previous
slide refers to L2 cache.
• A more detailed set of specification will
reveal the amount of L1 and L2 as well as
the amount of L3 that can be supported.
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Shared or not
• With multicore a question comes up with
L2 cache of whether each core should have
its own cache or whether the cache should
be shared among the cores.
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Cache coherence
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L3
• The term L3 is starting
to be used as for cache
on the chip, but in
addition to speed and
use, another
distinction is that each
core has its own L2
now whereas L3 is
shared.
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TDP
• With more smaller components on today’s
chips, there is potentially a lot of heat
generation.
• TDP is thermal design power and is a spec
that Intel has started reporting on their
processors.
• It is measured in watts.
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References
• PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Thompson and
Thompson
• http://www.webopedia.com
• http://www.intel.com
• http://www.anandtech.com
• http://www.mbreview.com/lga775.php
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References (Cont.)
• http://www.intel.com/technology/architectu
re-silicon/next-gen/whitepaper.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4
• http://software.intel.com/enus/articles/software-techniques-for-sharedcache-multi-core-systems/?wapkw=(cache)
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