RECENTLY LAUNCHED MICROPROCESSORS:

Intel’s Pentium-4 processor:

The Pentium-4 is fabricated in Intel's 0.18-micron CMOS process. Its die size is 217 mm2, power consumption is 50W. The Pentium 4 is available in 1.4GHz and 1.5Hz bins. At 1.5GHz the microprocessor delivers 535 SPECint2000 and 558 SPECfp2000 of performance. Currently it is the second-performing general-purpose microprocessor. The world champion isCompaq/Digital Alpha 21264B CPU delivering 544 SPECint2000 and 658

SPECfp2000 at 833 MHz. The previous Intel chip, Pentium-III

"Coppermine", had 442 SPECint2000 and 335 SPECfp2000 results at 1GHz. Pentium-4 is the first completely new x86-processor design from Intelsince the Pentium PRO processor, with its P6 micro-architecture, was introduced in 1995. Pentium-4' micro-architecture is known as NetBurst. It has many interesting features. Compared to the Intel Pentium-III processor,

Intel's NetBurst micro-architecture doubles the pipeline depth to 20 stages. In addition to the L1 8 KB data cache, the Pentium 4 processor includes an Execution Trace Cache that stores up to 12 K decoded micro-ops in the order of program execution. The on-die 256KB L2-cache is non-blocking, 8-way set associative. It employs 256-bit interface that delivers data transfer

rate of 48 GB/s at 1.5 GHz. The Pentium 4 processor expands the floatingpoint registers to a full 128-bit and adds an additional register for data movement. Pentium-4' NetBurst micro-architecture introduces Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2). This extends the SIMD capabilitiesthat MMX technology and SSE technology delivered by adding 144 new

instructions. These instructions include 128-bit SIMD integer arithmetic and 128-bit SIMD double-precision floating-point operations. Pentium 4 processor's 400 MHz (100 MHz "quad pumped") system bus provides up to 3.2 GB/s of bandwidth. The bus is fed by dual PC800 Rambus channel. Thiscompares to 1.06 GB/s delivered on the Pentium-III processor's 133-MHz

system bus.Two Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) on the Pentium 4 processor areclocked at twice the core processor frequency. This allows basic integer instructions such as Add, Subtract, Logical AND, Logical OR, etc. toexecute in a half clock cycle. The integer register file runs also runs at the double frequency. Interesting is that this method was firstly introduced by Elbrus team in their E2K processor design. The E2K design was described inMicroprocessor Report article by Keith Diefendorff in Feb 1999.(Alexin Pylkin, )

Elbrus E2K Russian company Elbrus International has disclosed the technicaldetails of its revolutionary new microprocessor E2K. The microprocessorwill function 3 to 5 times more quickly than Intel Merced while still runningall legacy MS DOS and Windows software. Fabricated in a 0.18-micronprocess, the chip would run at 1.2GHz and deliver 135 SPECint95 and 350 SPECfp95, yet require only 35 Watts of power and occupy 126 mm2 of

silicon. By contrast, Intel's forthcoming processor, which will bemanufactured in the same process, would operate at 800MHz, occupy 300mm2, consume 60 Watts, and score only 45 SPECint95 and 70 SPECfp95.

Elbrus technology does not infringe on any Western intellectual propertyand it is protected by 70 US patent applications.The technology underlying the E2k delivers computing performance that exceeds all other existing and planned processors, including Digital/Compaq Alpha. This extraordinary performance results from anincredibly efficient architecture design that has been continually refined bythe Elbrus team. Over the decades, it turns out, it was often far ahead ofWestern rivals, introducing cutting-edge techniques such as super scalardesign, shared-memory multiprocessing and explicitly parallel instructioncomputing (EPIC) before similar products or even papers on the subjects were available here.The Elbrus team, led by a supercomputer architect Boris Babaian(another transcription -- Babayan), has worked together for nearly 40 years,mostly for the former Soviet Union's and Russia's defense establishment.

Since 1992 the team works in tight cooperation with Sun Microsystems. The same team has taken a great part in developing Sun UltraSPARC processor,Sun UltraSPARC compilers, and Sun Solaris operating system. The E2Kproject is a commercial version of the design has already been used in the Russian Space Mission Control and the Russian Missile Defense System.

The previous chip was manufactured in February 1998 in 0.5-micron

process. (Pylkin, Alexei)

Intel announced new brand name for its Merced IA-64 microprocessor - Itanium. So, new HP/Intel microprocessor family has rather long list of brand names, code names, etc: Itanium, Merced, McKinley, Madison, Deerfild, IA-64, EPIC, P7, PlayDoh, Super-Parallel Processor Architecture (SP-PA), Wide-Word. Itanium is sampling now.Experimental systems with Itanium samples inside were demonstrated at last Intel Developer Forum. Nevertheless still it is not known about future

Itanium performance as well as other metrics. (Pylkin, Alexei