
Dual-Core Intel Itanium Processor 9000 Series Datasheet
11
Introduction
1
Introduction
1.1
Overview
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series employs Explicitly Parallel
Instruction Computing (EPIC) design concepts for a tighter coupling between hardware
and software. In this design style, the interface between hardware and software is
designed to enable the software to exploit all available compile-time information, and
efficiently deliver this information to the hardware. It addresses several fundamental
performance bottlenecks in modern computers, such as memory latency, memory
address disambiguation, and control flow dependencies. The EPIC constructs provide
powerful architectural semantics, and enable the software to make global optimizations
across a large scheduling scope, thereby exposing available Instruction Level
Parallelism (ILP) to the hardware. The hardware takes advantage of this enhanced ILP,
and provides abundant execution resources. Additionally, it focuses on dynamic run-
time optimizations to enable the compiled code schedule to flow at high throughput.
This strategy increases the synergy between hardware and software, and leads to
greater overall performance.
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series provides a 6-wide and 8-stage
deep pipeline, running at up to 1.6 GHz. This provides a combination of abundant
resources to exploit ILP as well as increased frequency for minimizing the latency of
each instruction. The resources consist of six integer units, six multimedia units, two
load and two store units, three branch units, two extended-precision floating point
units, and one additional single-precision floating point unit per core. The hardware
employs dynamic prefetch, branch prediction, a register scoreboard, and non-blocking
caches to optimize for compile-time non-determinism. Three levels of on-die cache
minimize overall memory latency. This includes up to a 24 MB L3 cache, accessed at
core speed, providing up to 8.53 GB/sec of data bandwidth. The system bus is designed
to support up to four physical processors (on a single system bus), and can be used as
an effective building block for very large systems. The balanced core and memory
subsystem provide high performance for a wide range of applications ranging from
commercial workloads to high performance technical computing.
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series supports a range of computing
needs and configurations from a 2-way to large SMP servers. This document provides
the electrical, mechanical and thermal specifications for the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2
processor 9000 series for use while using systems with the processors.
1.2
Processor Abstraction Layer
The Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 series requires implementation-specific
Processor Abstraction Layer (PAL) firmware. PAL firmware supports processor
initialization, error recovery, and other functionality. It provides a consistent interface
to system firmware and operating systems across processor hardware
implementations. The Intel Itanium Architecture Software Developer’s Manual,
Volume 2: System Architecture, describes PAL. Platforms must provide access to the
firmware address space and PAL at reset to allow the processors to initialize.
The System Abstraction Layer (SAL) firmware contains platform-specific firmware to
initialize the platform, boot to an operating system, and provide runtime functionality.
Further information about SAL is available in the Intel Itanium Processor Family
System Abstraction Layer Specification.