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P6 Microarchitecture
The P6 microarchitecture is the sixth-generation Intel x86 microarchitecture, implemented by the Pentium Pro microprocessor that was introduced in November 1995. It is frequently referred to as i686. It was succeeded by the NetBurst microarchitecture in 2000, but eventually revived in the Pentium M line of microprocessors. The successor to the Pentium M variant of the P6 microarchitecture is the Core microarchitecture which in turn is also derived from P6. P6 was used within Intel's mainstream offerings from the Pentium Pro to Pentium III, and was widely known for low power consumption, excellent integer performance, and relatively high instructions per cycle (IPC). The P6 line of processing cores was succeeded by the NetBurst (P68) architecture which appeared with the introduction of Pentium 4. The P6 core was the sixth generation Intel microprocessor in the x86 line. The first implementation of the P6 core was the Pentium Pro CPU in 1995, the immediate successor to the or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pentium II
The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB L2 cache), the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first ''P6''-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to the Pentium Pros. It is a single-core microprocessor. In 1998, Intel stratified the Pentium II family by releasing the Pentium II-based Celeron line of processors for low-end workstations and the Pentium II Xeon line for servers and high-end workstations. The Celeron was characterized by a reduced or omitted (in some cases present but disabled) on-die full-speed L2 cache and a 66 MT/s FSB. The Xeon was characterized by a range of full-speed L2 cache (from 512 KB to 2048 KB), a 100 MT/s FSB, a different physic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pentium Pro
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in supercomputers like ASCI Red, the first computer to reach the trillion ''floating point operations per second'' (teraFLOPS) performance mark. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II Xeon in 1998. Microarchitecture The lead architect of Pentium Pro was Fred Pollack who was specialized in sup ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
X86 Instruction Listings
The x86 instruction set refers to the set of instructions that x86-compatible microprocessors support. The instructions are usually part of an executable program, often stored as a computer file and executed on the processor. The x86 instruction set has been extended several times, introducing wider registers and datatypes as well as new functionality. x86 integer instructions Below is the full 8086/8088 instruction set of Intel (81 instructions total). Most if not all of these instructions are available in 32-bit mode; they just operate on 32-bit registers (eax, ebx, etc.) and values instead of their 16-bit (ax, bx, etc.) counterparts. The updated instruction set is also grouped according to architecture (i386, i486, i686) and more generally is referred to as (32-bit) x86 and (64-bit) x86-64 (also known as AMD64). Original 8086/8088 instructions Added in specific Intel processors Added with 80186/ 80188 Added with 80286 Added with 80386 Compared t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Register Renaming
In computer architecture, register renaming is a technique that abstracts logical registers from physical registers. Every logical register has a set of physical registers associated with it. When a machine language instruction refers to a particular logical register, the processor transposes this name to one specific physical register on the fly. The physical registers are opaque and cannot be referenced directly but only via the canonical names. This technique is used to eliminate false data dependencies arising from the reuse of registers by successive instructions that do not have any real data dependencies between them. The elimination of these false data dependencies reveals more instruction-level parallelism in an instruction stream, which can be exploited by various and complementary techniques such as superscalar and out-of-order execution for better performance. Problem approach In a register machine, programs are composed of instructions which operate on values. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Physical Address Extension
In computing, Physical Address Extension (PAE), sometimes referred to as Page Address Extension, is a memory management feature for the x86 architecture. PAE was first introduced by Intel in the Pentium Pro, and later by AMD in the Athlon processor. It defines a page table hierarchy of three levels (instead of two), with table entries of 64 bits each instead of 32, allowing these CPUs to directly access a physical address space larger than 4 gigabytes (232 bytes). The page table structure used by x86-64 CPUs when operating in long mode further extends the page table hierarchy to four levels, extending the virtual address space, and uses additional physical address bits at all levels of the page table, extending the physical address space. It also uses the topmost bit of the 64-bit page table entry as a no-execute or "NX" bit, indicating that code cannot be executed from the associated page. The NX feature is also available in protected mode when these CPUs are running a 32- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gunning Transceiver Logic
Gunning transceiver logic (GTL) is a type of logic signaling used to drive electronic backplane buses. It has a voltage swing between 0.4 volts and 1.2 volts—much lower than that used in TTL and CMOS logic—and symmetrical parallel resistive termination. The maximum signaling frequency is specified to be 100 MHz, although some applications use higher frequencies. GTL is defined by JEDEC standard JESD 8-3 (1993) and was invented by William Gunning while working for Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Center. All Intel front-side buses use GTL. As of 2008, GTL in these FSBs has a maximum frequency of 1.6 GHz. The front-side bus of the Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III microprocessors uses GTL+ (or GTLP) developed by Fairchild Semiconductor Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pipeline Stall
In the design of pipelined computer processors, a pipeline stall is a delay in execution of an instruction in order to resolve a hazard. Details In a standard five-stage pipeline, during the decoding stage, the control unit will determine whether the decoded instruction reads from a register to which the currently executed instruction writes. If this condition holds, the control unit will stall the instruction by one clock cycle. It also stalls the instruction in the fetch stage, to prevent the instruction in that stage from being overwritten by the next instruction in the program. In a Von Neumann architecture which uses the program counter (PC) register to determine the current instruction being fetched in the pipeline, to prevent new instructions from being fetched when an instruction in the decoding stage has been stalled, the value in the PC register and the instruction in the fetch stage are preserved to prevent changes. The values are preserved until the instruction c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Out-of-order Execution
In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (or more formally dynamic execution) is a paradigm used in most high-performance central processing units to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted. In this paradigm, a processor executes instructions in an order governed by the availability of input data and execution units, rather than by their original order in a program. In doing so, the processor can avoid being idle while waiting for the preceding instruction to complete and can, in the meantime, process the next instructions that are able to run immediately and independently. History Out-of-order execution is a restricted form of data flow computation, which was a major research area in computer architecture in the 1970s and early 1980s. The first machine to use out-of-order execution was the CDC 6600 (1964), designed by James E. Thornton, which uses a scoreboard to avoid conflicts. It permits an instruction to execute if its source operand (read) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speculative Execution
Speculative execution is an optimization technique where a computer system performs some task that may not be needed. Work is done before it is known whether it is actually needed, so as to prevent a delay that would have to be incurred by doing the work after it is known that it is needed. If it turns out the work was not needed after all, most changes made by the work are reverted and the results are ignored. The objective is to provide more concurrency if extra resources are available. This approach is employed in a variety of areas, including branch prediction in pipelined processors, value prediction for exploiting value locality, prefetching memory and files, and optimistic concurrency control in database systems.Lazy and Speculative Execution [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Execution Unit
In computer engineering, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of the central processing unit (CPU) that performs the operations and calculations as instructed by the computer program. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not to be confused with the CPU's main control unit), some registers, and other internal units such as an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), address generation unit (AGU), floating-point unit (FPU), load-store unit (LSU), branch execution unit (BEU) or some smaller and more specific components. archived on the |
Micro-operation
In computer central processing units, micro-operations (also known as micro-ops or μops, historically also as micro-actions) are detailed low-level instructions used in some designs to implement complex machine instructions (sometimes termed macro-instructions in this context). Usually, micro-operations perform basic operations on data stored in one or more registers, including transferring data between registers or between registers and external buses of the central processing unit (CPU), and performing arithmetic or logical operations on registers. In a typical fetch-decode-execute cycle, each step of a macro-instruction is decomposed during its execution so the CPU determines and steps through a series of micro-operations. The execution of micro-operations is performed under control of the CPU's control unit, which decides on their execution while performing various optimizations such as reordering, fusion and caching. Optimizations Various forms of μops have long bee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
