X86 Architecture
The CPU is a very small, and complex circuit board, composed of transistors, resistors, metal oxides, which have been layered onto silicon wafers. The speed or the frequency of the CPU is measured in Megahertz (MHz), or Gigahertz (GHz). One megahertz equals to one million clocks or oscillations per second. A CPU can only process data in clock-intervals, meaning that a CPU that can process 10 instructions per one clock cycles, and runs at 500MHz will equal in performance to a CPU that can process 5 instructions per one clock cycle, and runs at 1000MHz, or 1Ghz. A CPU, which is designed for high clock speeds, has to limit the work done in a single clock cycle. If decoding is a lot of work, you need many clock cycles or several stages in a CPU, which result in slower performance due to longer latency's. Until the late 80s, Intel was essentially the only maker of PC microprocessors. However, Intel is facing competition from other manufacturers who produce "Intel-compatible " chips. These chips support the Intel instruction set and are often less expensive than Intel chips. In some cases, they also offer better performance. Two of the principal manufacturers of Intel-compatible chips are Cyrix and AMD.
The Intel Pentium III processor available at speeds ranging from 450 MHz to 1.33 GHz integrates the P6 Dynamic Execution micro architecture, Dual Independent Bus (DIB) Architecture, a multi-transaction system bus, Intel MMX media enhancement technology. In addition, the Pentium III processor offers Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions, 70 instructions enabling advanced imaging, 3D streaming audio and video, and speech recognition for better Internet use. Other versions also include an Advanced Transfer Cache and Advanced System Buffering to meet the higher data bandwidth requirements in today's world. One very important feature is the Data integrity features such as Error Correction Code, Fault Analysis and Recovery for both system and L2 cache buses. These features go along good with the Built-in Self Test. The BIST provides single stuck-at fault coverage of the micro code and large logic arrays, as well as testing of the instruction cache, data cache, Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs), and ROMs. CPU Speed 450 MHz - 1 GHz 500 MHz - 1 GHz 1.4 GHz - 2.2 GHz 1.67 GHz At this point in time, the market for DDR and Rambus memory is relatively small. However, it is growing. Mustang Memory will support both of these memory products and any other new technology as soon as the market is available. So why did the 810 SDRAM outperform the 820 Rambus? There were a number of factors that caused this level of performance. For one, most would think that Data flow at 800MHz is faster than a bandwidth of 266Mhz. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only factor that determines the performance. While Rambus modules may have the ability to transfer data faster, it appears to have higher latency (the amount of time you have to wait until data flows) than that of a DDR system. In other words, the first data item transferred in a Rambus transaction takes longer to initiate than the first data item moved in a DDR system. This is due in part to how the systems are constructed. A big advantage that DDR has is each DIMM is connected, individually and in parallel, to the data bus. So whether you have a single DIMM or multiple DIMMs, the amount of time it takes to initiate a data transfer is effectively unchanged. Where in a RAMBUS, RIMM modules are connected to the bus in a series. The f! Transistors 9,500,000 28,100,000 55,000,000 37,500,000
Some topics in this essay:
Memory Memory,
Gigahertz GHz,
Mbytes L3,
Pentium IV,
ALi Micron,
RDRAM Manufacturers,
Media Encoder,
MicroDesign Resources,
SDRAM RDRAM,
SSE SSE2,
pentium iii,
clock cycle,
pentium 4,
quantispeed architecture,
front-side bus,
l2 cache,
bus speed,
mhz 1 ghz,
bus speeds,
cycle p4,
system clock,
pentium iii processor,
execution trace cache,
clock cycle p4,
cache 12000 instructions,
Join now to see the rest of the essay!
Approximate Word count = 2233
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
More Essays on X86 Architecture Professional Papers: |
CUSTOMER SERVICES
|
|
Saved Papers
You haven't saved any papers.
|