Into the Core: Intel's next-generation microarchitecture

[Tyler]

When Intel's team in Israel set about designing the processor architecture that would carry the company's entire x86 product line for the next five years or so, they had multicore computing in mind. But for Intel, having multicore in mind doesn't mean quite the same thing that it means for Sun or IBM. Specifically, it "multicore" doesn't mean "throw out out-of-order execution and scale back single-threaded performance in favor of a massively parallel architecture that can run a torrent of simultaneous threads." Such an aggressive, forward-looking approach is embodied in designs like STI's Cell and Sun's Ultrasparc T1. Instead, Intel's understanding of what it takes to make a "multicore" architecture is significantly more conservative, and very "Intel."

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