Barcelona Architecture: AMD on the Counterattack
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 1, 2007 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
New Prefetcher
Prefetching is done in many areas of the system and by many different components. When NVIDIA introduced its nForce2 chipset, it stressed the ability of its intelligent prefetcher to make use of a very wide, at the time, 128-bit memory bus. More recently, when Intel introduced its Core 2 processor family it stressed the importance of its three prefetchers per core in drastically reducing perceived memory latency.
AMD's K8 core had two prefetchers per core - one instruction and one data. The Barcelona core still retains the same number of prefetchers, but improves on them. The biggest change is that the data prefetcher now brings data directly into the L1 data cache, as opposed to the L2 cache in the K8. AMD looked at the accuracy of its core prefetchers and realized that they were doing quite well, so it only made sense to prefetch into a low latency L1 and avoid polluting the L2 cache. AMD has also increased the flexibility of its L1 instruction cache prefetcher to handle two outstanding requests to any address.
At first glance it looks like Intel's prefetchers in Core 2 are greater, at least in quantity, than what AMD has planned even for Barcelona. Remember that Intel's Core 2 processor features two data and one instruction prefetcher per core, plus an additional two L2 cache prefetchers, all of which are well managed as to not eat into "demand" bandwidth. At the same time, we must keep in mind that Intel needs these prefetchers to help mask its longer trip to main memory. From a CPU perspective, the advantage here is for Intel, but as a platform the true winner is tough to determine.
Each Barcelona core gets its own set of data and instruction prefetchers, but the major improvement is that there's a new prefetcher in town - a DRAM prefetcher. Residing within the memory controller where AMD previously never had any such logic, the new DRAM prefetcher takes a look at overall memory requests and attempts to pull data it thinks will be used in the future. As this prefetcher has to contend with the needs of four separate cores, it really helps the entire chip improve performance and can do a good job of spotting trends that would positively impact all cores. The DRAM prefetcher doesn't pull data into the CPU's L2 or L3 caches either; instead it features its own buffer to avoid polluting the caches. The buffer is approximately 20 - 30 cache lines in size and happens to be the same buffer that is used for Barcelona's write bursting we mentioned on the previous page.
Prefetching is done in many areas of the system and by many different components. When NVIDIA introduced its nForce2 chipset, it stressed the ability of its intelligent prefetcher to make use of a very wide, at the time, 128-bit memory bus. More recently, when Intel introduced its Core 2 processor family it stressed the importance of its three prefetchers per core in drastically reducing perceived memory latency.
AMD's K8 core had two prefetchers per core - one instruction and one data. The Barcelona core still retains the same number of prefetchers, but improves on them. The biggest change is that the data prefetcher now brings data directly into the L1 data cache, as opposed to the L2 cache in the K8. AMD looked at the accuracy of its core prefetchers and realized that they were doing quite well, so it only made sense to prefetch into a low latency L1 and avoid polluting the L2 cache. AMD has also increased the flexibility of its L1 instruction cache prefetcher to handle two outstanding requests to any address.
At first glance it looks like Intel's prefetchers in Core 2 are greater, at least in quantity, than what AMD has planned even for Barcelona. Remember that Intel's Core 2 processor features two data and one instruction prefetcher per core, plus an additional two L2 cache prefetchers, all of which are well managed as to not eat into "demand" bandwidth. At the same time, we must keep in mind that Intel needs these prefetchers to help mask its longer trip to main memory. From a CPU perspective, the advantage here is for Intel, but as a platform the true winner is tough to determine.
Each Barcelona core gets its own set of data and instruction prefetchers, but the major improvement is that there's a new prefetcher in town - a DRAM prefetcher. Residing within the memory controller where AMD previously never had any such logic, the new DRAM prefetcher takes a look at overall memory requests and attempts to pull data it thinks will be used in the future. As this prefetcher has to contend with the needs of four separate cores, it really helps the entire chip improve performance and can do a good job of spotting trends that would positively impact all cores. The DRAM prefetcher doesn't pull data into the CPU's L2 or L3 caches either; instead it features its own buffer to avoid polluting the caches. The buffer is approximately 20 - 30 cache lines in size and happens to be the same buffer that is used for Barcelona's write bursting we mentioned on the previous page.
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chucky2 - Friday, March 2, 2007 - link
Can you post the link that originates at AMD's own website then that says specifically that AM2+ CPU's are guaranteed to work - understandably maybe not supporting every new feature - in current AM2 boards?Not a news post from DailyTech, The Inquirer, Toms, whatever...one that's on AMD's site itself.
And No, AMD could make AM2+ completely incompatible with current AM2 boards and they probably wouldn't see much drop if at all from the large OEM's. The large OEM's would just ensure that when the AM2+ CPU's came in, AM2+ motherboards would likewise come in.
Believe me, I want to see the link...because I'm desperately awaiting 690G or MCP68, whichever comes first (which is probably MCP68 at the pace AMD is moving on 690G).
Chuck
yacoub - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
You say 128kb L1 per core but the diagram image just beneath that text shows a 64bit L1 cache. Please confirm which it is.
Thanks.
Awesome article, btw. Seems like quite a significant group of changes to the CPU. Looking forward to seeing how it stacks up against the best Quad Core2 Intel can offer. =)
yacoub - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
also, please forgive my hasty typing - I wrote "128kb" and "64bit" - I meant "128KB" and "64KB"JarredWalton - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
L1 is 128K total - 64K data and 64K instruction.Beenthere - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
AMD doesn't do knee-jerk reactions like Intel because AMD has superior products. AMD continues to take market share from Intel in every segment and Barcelona will continue that trend. Barcelona looks to be every bit as superior to Intel's hacked/patched/glued together chips as Opteron was when introduced. Intel's chips depend on huge cache size for their performance and that crutch won't work after the intro of Barcelona.For those without a clue, AMD didn't start design of Barcelona last week or last year. It's been in the development pipeline for many years and thr performance will demonstrate exactly why AMD's long term platform stability is the right choice for most enterprise buyers. Intel is gonna feel the pain again.
Roy2001 - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Facts please, no BS.zsdersw - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Idiocy incarnate.Regs - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
AMD, like Intel, start numerious projects. Just not all of them get to this finish line. Actually a lot of them don't even reach the end of the planning phase before being scratched.As for Intel and their large caches...well I'd say it's amazing how half their die (if not more) is used for cache and still had enough space for all the core logic that's kicking the crap out of the K8 now.
Common sense!
erwos - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
Looks like some good improvements coming down the pipe. The cache size issue makes me nervous, though - 512kb per core is starting to look a little antiquated, and there's no information about the bandwidth to the L3 cache (which, presumably, is slower than L2).SmokeRngs - Thursday, March 1, 2007 - link
In the past, AMD did not need the large cache sizes that Intel did for their processors. This was very obvious in regards to the Netburst architecture. However, while Core2 is much better than Netburst there are still disadvantages for Intel.I'll explain a little background as far as I understand it. In the K7 and Netburst days, Intel had to have the cache to make up for their long pipeline. Branch mispredictions are going to happen and the penalty on the long pipeline of the Netburst processors hurt their IPC badly. The shorter pipeline on the K7 did not have the same performance penalty due to the shorter pipeline. With K8, the on die memory controller also negated the need for large L2 caches due to the reduced latency when accessing main memory. This has been one of the major performance aspects for the K8 architecture.
The Core2 architecture obviously does not have the on die memory controller so the need for larger caches is still present and Intel sees improvement due to the larger caches. Barcelona still has the on die memory controller and the previous efficiency is still there and still negates the need for large caches. This is just the difference between architectures. While having a larger cache on the K8 did improve performance some in some usage scenarios, it wasn't on the same scale as the improvements Intel received with a larger cache.
AMD can't compete with Intel in regards to cache size. However, other architecture differences make up for the lack of large amounts of cache. Barcelona having a smaller cache does not seem to be a big problem. If it was a big problem, AMD probably would have gone with a larger cache to get the extra performance. Bigger does not always mean better or at least enough better to warrant the extra.
Smaller cache will mean fewer transistors which should mean better yields, lower power consumption and cheaper to produce.