Intel's new Core Architecture revealed

David Kanter over at RWT has posted a whopper of an article that gives the goods on Intel's new Core architecture. The article comes complete with a nice architectural diagram that puts to rest any doubts about whether Core is in the P6 lineage (the Pentium Pro down through the Pentium III, which with major changes includes the Pentium M). Although it combines the best features of the Pentium 4 and the P6-derived Yonah, Core tends to look more like Yonah than anything else.

I won't add a ton of comments to David's excellent article, because I'm working on a Core architecture piece of my own. What I will say is that Core's design is seriously conservative. Now, in saying this I'm definitely not knocking Core, nor am I discounting the number of genuine innovations that are included in it. On the contrary, in calling it "seriously conservative" I'm also saying that it probably seriously works on the code that's out there right now, as opposed to the code that everyone wishes were out there. Nonetheless, there's no escaping the fact that, big-picture wise, Core reminds me a lot of the PowerPC 970—the 4 + 1 instructions/cycle dispatch width, the very wide execution core, the deep buffers, and so on. In apparent contrast to post-970 IBM, which seems to be moving in the direction charted by the Cell's PPE, Intel clearly believes that the days of the wide, aggressively out-of-order design are by no means over. In fact, Core indicates that Intel thinks we're entering out-of-order execution's heyday.