Intel Itanium 9140M NE80567KF028009 Manuale Utente

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Dual-Core Intel
®
 Itanium
®
 Processor 9000 and 9100 Series Datasheet
11
Introduction
1
Introduction
1.1
Overview
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor 9000 and 9100 series employs Explicitly Parallel 
Instruction Computing (EPIC) design concepts for a tighter coupling between hardware 
and software. In this design style, the interface between hardware and software is 
engineered to enable the software to exploit all available compile-time information and 
efficiently deliver this information to the hardware. It addresses several fundamental 
performance bottlenecks in modern computers, such as memory latency, memory 
address disambiguation, and control flow dependencies. The EPIC constructs provide 
powerful architectural semantics and enable the software to make global optimizations 
across a large scheduling scope, thereby exposing available Instruction Level 
Parallelism (ILP) to the hardware. The hardware takes advantage of this enhanced ILP, 
and provides abundant execution resources. Additionally, it focuses on dynamic run-
time optimizations to enable the compiled code schedule to flow at high throughput. 
This strategy increases the synergy between hardware and software, and leads to 
greater overall performance.
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor 9000 and 9100 series provides a 6-wide and 8-
stage deep pipeline, running at up to 1.6 GHz. This provides a combination of abundant 
resources to exploit ILP as well as increased frequency for minimizing the latency of 
each instruction. The resources consist of six integer units, six multimedia units, two 
load and two store units, three branch units, two extended-precision floating-point 
units, and one additional single-precision floating-point unit per core. The hardware 
employs dynamic prefetch, branch prediction, a register scoreboard, and non-blocking 
caches to optimize for compile-time non-determinism. Three levels of on-die cache 
minimize overall memory latency. This includes up to a 24 MB L3 cache, accessed at 
core speed, providing up to 8.53 GB/sec. of data bandwidth. The system bus is 
designed to support up to four physical processors (on a single system bus), and can 
be used as an effective building block for very large systems. The balanced core and 
memory subsystem provide high performance for a wide range of applications ranging 
from commercial workloads to high-performance technical computing.
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor 9000 and 9100 series supports a range of 
computing needs and configurations from a two-way to large SMP servers. This 
document provides the electrical, mechanical and thermal specifications for the Dual-
Core Intel Itanium processor 9000 and 9100 series for use while employing systems 
with the processors.
1.2
Processor Abstraction Layer
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor 9000 and 9100 series requires implementation-
specific Processor Abstraction Layer (PAL) firmware. PAL firmware supports processor 
initialization, error recovery, and other functionality. It provides a consistent interface 
to system firmware and operating systems across processor hardware 
implementations. The Intel
®
 Itanium
®
 Architecture Software Developer’s Manual, 
Volume 2: System Architecture, describes PAL. Platforms must provide access to the 
firmware address space and PAL at reset to allow the processors to initialize.