Intel's Pentium 4 E: Prescott Arrives with Luggage
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on February 1, 2004 3:06 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Pipelining: 101
It seems like every time Intel releases a new processor we have to revisit the topic of pipelining to help explain why a 3GHz P4 performs like a 2GHz Athlon 64. With a 55% longer pipeline than Northwood, Prescott forces us to revisit this age old topic once again.
You've heard it countless times before: pipelining is to a CPU as the assembly line is to a car plant. A CPU's pipeline is not a physical pipe that data goes into and appears at the end of, instead it is a collection of "things to do" in order to execute instructions. Every instruction must go through the same steps, and we call these steps stages.
The stages of a pipeline do things like find out what instruction to execute next, find out what two numbers are going to be added together, find out where to store the result, perform the add, etc...
The most basic CPU pipeline can be divided into 5 stages:
1. Instruction Fetch
2. Decode Instructions
3. Fetch Operands
4. Execute
5. Store to Cache
You'll notice that those five stages are very general in their description, at the same time you could make a longer pipeline with more specific stages:
1. Instruction Fetch 1
2. Instruction Fetch 2
3. Decode 1
4. Decode 2
5. Fetch Operands
6. Dispatch
7. Schedule
8. Execute
9. Store to Cache 1
10. Store to Cache 2
Both pipelines have to accomplish the same task: instructions come in, results go out. The difference is that each of the five stages of the first pipeline must do more work than each of the ten stages of the second pipeline.
If all else were the same, you'd want a 5-stage pipeline like the first case, simply because it's easier to fill 5 stages with data than it is to fill 10. And if your pipeline is not constantly full of data, you're losing precious execution power - meaning your CPU isn't running as efficiently as it could.
The only reason you would want the second pipeline is if, by making each stage simpler, you can get the time it takes to complete each stage to be significantly quicker than in the previous design. Your slowest (most complicated) stage determines how quickly you can get data through each stage - keep that in mind.
Let's say that the first pipeline results in each stage taking 1ns to complete and if each stage takes 1 clock cycle to execute, we can build a 1GHz processor (1/1ns = 1GHz) using this pipeline. Now in order to make up for the fact that we have more stages (and thus have more of a difficult time keeping the pipeline full), the second design must have a significantly shorter clock period (the amount of time each stage takes to complete) in order to offer equal/greater performance to the first design. Thankfully, since we're doing less work per clock - we can reduce the clock period significantly. Assuming that we've done our design homework well, let's say we get the clock period down to 0.5ns for the second design.
Design 2 can now scale to 2GHz, twice the clock speed of the original CPU and we will get twice the performance - assuming we can keep the pipeline filled at all times. Reality sets in and it becomes clear that without some fancy footwork, we can't keep that pipeline full all the time - and all of the sudden our 2GHz CPU isn't performing twice as fast as our 1GHz part.
Make sense? Now let's relate this to the topic at hand.
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Jeff7181 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say 2004 is the year of the Athlon-64 and Intel will take a back seat this year unless their new socket will help increase clock speeds. When AMD makes the transition to 90nm I think you'll see a jump in clock speed from them too... and I'm willing to bet their current 130nm processors will scale to 2.6 or 2.8 Ghz if they want to put the effort into it before switching to 90nm.Intel better hope people adopt SSE3 in favor of AMD-64 otherwise they're going to lose the majority of the benchmark tests.
On second thought... the real question is how high will Prescott scale... will we really see 4.0 Ghz by the end of the year? Will performance scale as well as it does with the Athlon-64?
Right now, looking at the Prescott, the best I can say for it is "huh, 31 stages in the pipeline and they didn't lose too much performance, neat."
Barkuti - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Check out the article at xbitlabs:http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/presc...
Less technical but with a wider set of tests.
Stlr22 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
;-)Stlr22 - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
((((((((((((((CRAMITPAL))))))))))))))))Listen,I just want you to know that everything will be alright. Really, life isn't all that bad buddy. It's not good to keep so much hate inside. It's very unhealthy. We are all family here at the Anandtech forums and we care about you. If you ever need to sit down and talk, I'm ll ears pal. So that your brother doesn't feel left out, here's a hug for him aswell.......
(((((((((((((AMDjihad)))))))))))))
KF - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Yeah, the Inquirer was right about 30 stages. Maybe I should start reading it! However I did read the one where the news linked to an article purporting that an Inquirer reporter had bumped into a person who had overheard an Intel executive say Prescott was 64 bit. Maybe Derek and Anand didn't have the space to squeeze that tiny detail into the review.I saw a paper on the Intel site a while ago, seemingly intended for some professional jounal, the premise of which was that it is ALWAYS preferable to make the pipeline longer, no matter how long, while using techniques to reduce the penalties. Like, 100 stages would be a good thing. Right then I knew what one team at Intel was up to. The fact that they didn't explain any new penalty reduction techniques only made it all the more sure what Intel had in the works (otherwise why write the paper?), and that they had the techniques worked out, but still under wraps.
ianwhthse - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Err.. *CramitpalSorry about that. My mind is wandering.
ianwhthse - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
Did we actually just get 26 good posts in before crumpet showed up?FiberOptik - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
I like the part about the new shift/rotate unit on the CPU. Does this mean that prescott will be noticeably faster for the RC5 project? Athlon's usually mop the floor with whatever the Northwood can pump out.eBauer - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
"Botmatch has bots (AI) playing, shooting, running, etc. (deathmatch) while Flyby does not. The number that you should be most interested in is the Botmatch scores."No, I am talking about the botmatch scores from previous articles. Well aware of the difference between flyby and botmatch. http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1946&a... In that article, all CPU's had about 10 more fps than the CPU's in the prescott article.
AnonymouseUser - Sunday, February 1, 2004 - link
"I am curious as to why the UT2k3 botmatch scores dropped on all CPU's... Different map?"Botmatch has bots (AI) playing, shooting, running, etc. (deathmatch) while Flyby does not. The number that you should be most interested in is the Botmatch scores.