4 ms·
Thank you, people usually miss the importance of Banias and Centrino. Banias was the Israeli team asking how do we make an incredibly efficient mobile CPU and
by cptskippy 3y ago
Thank you, people usually miss the importance of Banias and Centrino.
Banias was the Israeli team asking how do we make an incredibly efficient mobile CPU and the answer was finish your work quickly and go to sleep.
In order to finish quickly, you had to be fast and efficient. Someone said well what if we don't actually go to sleep?
IIRCC, Core was a combination of the Banias CPU architecture, an evolution of P3, combined with the Netburst bus architecture from P4.
- jmyeet 3y agoI believe you’re correct: the Pentium M in the original Centrino platform that became Core Duo was a Pentium 3 derivative (for laptops). I’d forgotten that. Pentium 4 was heavily marketing driven, to win the Gigahertz war.
- javitron 3y agoP4 was also, initially, process-driven. The fab side of Intel had a huge priority in setting early architectural themes. And some of the CMOs flows in lab, in mid 90s, were showing huge speed scaling, but they had very restrictive design rules and cell libraries. But with the payout of extreme GHz scaling. From that point of view, the P4 made sense; a narrow architecture with very deep pipelines. Where each stage used the tiny datapaths between latches/registers those libraries supported. Netburst makes sense in terms of dealing with extremely deep out of order pipelines. However, those processes never met the scaling roadmaps. While the power consumption scaled horribly, and things like thermal, leakage and variability started to become first order limiters.
- xattt 3y ago> In order to finish quickly, you had to be fast and efficient. How did they get to the point of finish-your-work-quickly? Short pipelines?
- cptskippy 3y agoIntel invested heavily in P4 and made the P4 pipeline really long which allowed for higher clocks. So for Banias started with the P3 pipeline which was already short and added the microop fusion that I believe was introduced in P4. As well a cribbing a lot of other enhancements from Netburst. It's been several years since I read up on it so I'm rust on all the details.
- selimthegrim 3y agoIsn’t Banias in Syria lol
- cptskippy 3y agoIntel's code names for projects are usually geographical in nature and this was designed by their Israeli-based R&D team, that that tracks.