The Core Microarchitecture

Background

Architectures and Microarchitectures

Though the terms are often used interchangably, there's nevertheless a clear distinction between a processor's architecture and its microarchitecture.

Intel has gotten alot of mileage out of the IA-32 architecture, much more so than the IA-64 and IXA architectures. IA-32 stands for Intel Architecture, 32-bit.

AMD, for that matter, too, has gotten alot out of IA-32, what with the success of processors like the Athlon 64, A64-X2, A64-FX, and Opteron.

IA-32, or Intel Architecture 32-bit, encompasses several generations of microarchitecture designs, that stretch back all the way to the microarchitectures of the Pentium and its successors, up through the NetBurst and the Core microarchitectures of today.

A microarchitecture is an "implementation of processor architecture in silicon".

A processor, in turn, is an implementation of a microarchitecture.

It is important that microarchitectures adhere to the instruction set definition and other structures of the parent architecture, so that code written for one will run across all microarchitectures of the parent microarchitecture: for example, so that software will run on both AMD and Intel microprocessors, so that code written for the Pentium 4 will also run on Core 2 Duo.

Intellectual Predecessor

The Energy Efficient Ideas

Instructions Per Clock

Power Consumption

Scalability

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