The more recent details about the Silverthorne processor indicate that it features HyperThreading support and also hardware virtualization technology. Intel also claims that the CPU's instruction set architecture is fully compatible with the Core 2 and that it has a power consumption from 0.5W to 2W at a top clock speed of 2GHz. Final clockspeeds are still subject to official confirmation.
The return of HyperThreading - planned also for a big comeback with Nehalem - is a surprise, but in today's multithreaded landscape it will be very useful. The current scenario is far better than the one that the Pentium 4 3.06 faced when it came to life, while the performance increase we could expect from using HT in this core might even surpass the optimistic 30% from that time.
The reason for that is that when the processor stalls, or is unable to have it's two execution units in utilization, it may pull another thread for execution. In this case however, being an in-order core, and if proper compiler optimization was not well executed, the CPU will stall much more frequently than a typical out-of-order CPU. That brings a bigger performance increase to the table then what was possible with the P4.
Tukwila is also an interesting chip, and a big one, fruit of it's two billion transistors.
It features the typical Itanium ISA, IA64, but brings some improvements which will also come with Nehalem, like dual integrated memory controllers, QuickPath interconnect - similar to AMD's HyperTransport - and a whooping 30MB of L2 cache. Hyperthreading is also back and, being a quad-core, allows for running 8 threads at the same time, in hardware.
The expected TDP for Tukwila is 130W, because the processor is still manufactured at the old 65nm process. Reasons for that were outlined by Intel's CTO, Justin Rattner:
Rattner said that the decision to stick with 65nm was "probably" due to reliability concerns. "90 percent of the latches on Tukwila are SER-hardened," he said, referring to error-resistant logic circuits designed to shrug off the effects of cosmic rays. As components in processors get smaller, they are more prone to electronic errors caused by radiation, he said. Rattner added that it was possible that the next generation of Itanium would skip 45nm and go straight to 32nm.
Tukwila will come towards the end of 2008, in a LGA 1366 derived socket format, and will feature socket and chipset compatibility with Nehalem based Xeon CPUs, due to the use of the new QuickPath interconnect.
The original news post is available at ZDNet.
Keywords: Intel Silverthorne HT hypertreading tukwila
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