The Core Microarchitecture

Background

Architectures and Microarchitectures

Intellectual Predecessor

Core is a brand new microarchitecture. Hence, it's a different implementation of an architecture. Hence it was redesigned mostly from the ground up.

Some of the microarchitectural innovations of Core are themselves new and cannot be traced back to any other microarchitecture before them.

Other elements of the Core microarchitecture go back to Netburst, which is the desktop and server microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 and of many Xeon processors.

That being said, the intellectual predecessor of the Core microarchitecture is not Netburst, but rather the mobile microarchitecture of the Pentium M and later of the Core Duo and Core Solo notebook processors. What the Core and Mobile microarchitectures share is a common set of ideas around which their designs were built.

You see, while Intel was busy driving power usage up on the desktop and server, it was also driving down energy and heat on its notebooks. The reasons for this were eminently practical: longer battery life, and the heat constraints of smaller form factors.

While the reasons for managing energy may have been practical, energy efficiency in itself wasn't very glamorous. At the time, gigahertz was all the rage.

The mobile microarchitectures of the Pentium M was thus designed around ideas about how to minimize and make the most of power. The same might be said of the Core microarchitecture. Core "extends the energy efficient philosophy first delivered in Intel's mobile microarchitecture found in the Intel Pentium M processor".

The Energy Efficient Ideas

Instructions Per Clock

Power Consumption

Scalability

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