Barcelona Architecture: AMD on the Counterattack

[Babrbarossa]

This is a well-written review by the King of Anandtech (Anand Lal Shimpi) of AMD's journey from the K7 to the Barcelona and the technological advances therein. It's just technical enough that I learned alot without my eyes glazing over and my ears ringing. It is also a heart warming story of hope and perseverence ok maybe not quite, but worth reading.

"Over the past several years, Intel has followed an odd path of microprocessor design. On the heels of the success of the P6 core, Intel set two teams in motion - one to work on the NetBurst architecture that would be the foundation of the Pentium 4, and one to work on a low-cost, low power highly integrated core that would eventually be redesigned into the Pentium M. The team eventually charged with designing the Pentium M took a more evolutionary approach building off of the strengths of the P6 architecture, while the NetBurst team preferred a radical departure from Intel's previously most successful architecture at the time.

We all know how this story ends; as NetBurst evolved, so did the underlying architecture of the Pentium M. Dothan was the first tweak of the Pentium M and it was mostly a clean up job to fix some performance issues with the original core. Higher clock speeds, more cache, and slight increases in IPC were on Dothan's CV.

Intel's Israel Development Center (IDC) then took Dothan and re-architected it to be a native dual core solution, complete with a shared L2 cache, the first of its type for an Intel processor. The Dothan to Yonah progression was far more significant than the move from Banias to Dothan, not just because Yonah was dual core but also because of the many architectural improvements that went into Yonah.

The next step Intel took is one we're all familiar with, and involves the most radical design change of the Pentium M's short lived history; Intel took Yonah and made it wider, deeper, and far more efficient. Out came the Core 2 line of processors and with it, Intel regained the undisputed performance crown it hadn't seen ever since the debut of AMD's Athlon 64.

While many argued that Banias, the first Pentium M core, was merely a modern take on the P6 architecture it's hard to see much in common between today's Core 2 and the 11 year old Pentium Pro. The P6 core was a starting point for a long line of evolution that brought Intel to where it is today.

AMD took a far more conservative approach over the past several years; it all started with the success of the K7 core, effectively a wider, faster, competitor to later versions of Intel's P6 architecture. While one of Intel's teams was busy making radical departures from anything AMD or Intel had done in the past, AMD didn't have the luxury of running two large scale microprocessor projects in tandem. The solution was to take the K7 core and improve on it, rather than taking a risky step in a different direction."

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