Technology
The Intel Core Microarchitecture was designed from the ground up, but is similar to the Pentium M microarchitecture in design philosophy. The Penryn pipeline is 12-14 stages long — less than half of Prescott's, a signature feature of wide order execution cores. Penryn's successor, Nehalem has 16 pipeline stages. Core's execution unit is 4 issues wide, compared to the 3-issue cores of P6, Pentium M, and NetBurst microarchitectures. The new architecture is a dual core design with linked L1 cache and shared L2 cache engineered for maximum performance per watt and improved scalability.
One new technology included in the design is Macro-Ops Fusion, which combines two x86 instructions into a single micro-operation. For example, a common code sequence like a compare followed by a conditional jump would become a single micro-op.
Other new technologies include 1 cycle throughput (2 cycles previously) of all 128-bit SSE instructions and a new power saving design. All components will run at minimum speed, ramping up speed dynamically as needed (similar to AMD's Cool'n'Quiet power-saving technology, as well as Intel's own SpeedStep technology from earlier mobile processors). This allows the chip to produce less heat, and consume as little power as possible.
For most Woodcrest CPUs, the front side bus (FSB) runs at 1333 MT/s; however, this is scaled down to 1066 MT/s for lower end 1.60 and 1.86 GHz variants. The Merom mobile variant was initially targeted to run at a FSB of 667 MT/s while the second wave of Meroms, supporting 800 MT/s FSB, were released as part of the Santa Rosa platform with a different socket in May 2007. The desktop-oriented Conroe began with models having an FSB of 800 MT/s or 1066 MT/s with a 1333 MT/s line officially launched on July 22, 2007.
The power consumption of these new processors is extremely low—average use energy consumption is to be in the 1-2 watt range in ultra low voltage variants, with thermal design powers (TDPs) of 65 watts for Conroe and most Woodcrests, 80 watts for the 3.0 GHz Woodcrest, and 40 watts for the low-voltage Woodcrest. In comparison, an AMD Opteron 875HE processor consumes 55 watts, while the energy efficient Socket AM2 line fits in the 35 watt thermal envelope (specified a different way so not directly comparable). Merom, the mobile variant, is listed at 35 watts TDP for standard versions and 5 watts TDP for Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) versions.
Previously, Intel announced that it would now focus on power efficiency, rather than raw performance. However, at IDF in the spring of 2006, Intel advertised both. Some of the promised numbers were:
- 20% more performance for Merom at the same power level (compared to Core Duo)
- 40% more performance for Conroe at 40% less power (compared to Pentium D)
- 80% more performance for Woodcrest at 35% less power (compared to the original dual-core Xeon)
Read more about this topic: Intel Core (microarchitecture)
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—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)