A Tour of the Pentium Pro Processor Microarchitecture
Introduction
One of the Pentium Pro processor's primary goals was to significannot
ly exceed the
performance of the 100MHz Pentium processor while being manufactured on the same
semiconductor process. Using the same process as a volume production processor
practically assured that the Pentium Pro processor would be manufacturable, but
it meant that Intel had to focus on an improved microarchitecture for ALL of the
performance gains. This guided tour describes how multiple architectural
techniques - some proven in mainframe computers, some proposed in academia and
some we innovated ourselves - were carefully interwoven, modified, enhanced,
tuned and implemented to produce the Pentium Pro microprocessor. This unique
combination of architectural features, which Intel describes as Dynamic
Execution, enabled the first Pentium Pro processor silicon to exceed the
original performance goal.
Building from an already high platform
The......
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