Quad Core Processor Technology

Written by Zameer Rahman

Quad Core Processor 2011

Index

Abstract
I. Road to Quad Core Quad Core Processor What is quad core? Quad Core Chip Design Quad Core Processors Architecture Quad Core Processing Features And Benefits Of INTEL Quad Core Processor

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Conclusion References

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Abstract The evolution of computer processor design passed many stages in last few decades. Still the worlds hunger for better performance in computing is never satisfied. The need for more powerful processors is increasing due to the complexity of our computing tasks and demand of computers in the mass market. As the software applications becoming more sophisticated the demand for higher performing processors is becoming inevitable in our life. Nowadays, Computer is integrated in every aspect for our life. From Wall Street to local shopping stores software applications are being used. Computer is storing and protecting all kinds of data and via computer networks everyone is connected to the cyber space. Today we can do a lot of things by using computers which were considered as sciences fictions in earlier decades. In near future software applications might create realworld simulations so vivid that people will no longer identify whether it is real or artificial. Now-a-day in the field of computer architecture no one is building a much faster sequential processor. The attention is shifted to multiple processors per chip in order to cope up with processing needs. The multi-core processors are leading the computing technology now. Quad core processor is one of the greatest forms of multicore processor architecture. The quad core processor is turned single-core processors into
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ancient relic by providing better performance and productivity. Since the attention shifted to multiple processor per chip the maximum power dissipation in air cooled chips are decreased. The exploiting of instruction level parallelism is done more efficiently and the memory latency is changed dramatically.

II.

Road to Quad Core

If we study the evolution of quad core processors the first thing we will notice that the Moores Law isnt really dead. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore stated that The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. This famous comment in regarding the pace of semiconductor technology is considered at as Moores Law. That time there were approximately 60 devices on a chip. After four decades later when we see Intel placed 1.7 billion transistors on its Itanium chip we can hardly deny this law anymore. It means that Intel is providing us better computers at lower price. At first hyper threading is introduced to the world of computing. It used thread level parallelism where each tread acted like a separate processor with its own instruction and data. After some time, the introduction of multi-core architecture gave birth to dual core processors, where there are two separate cores in the same die of the processor chip, each with
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its own cache. In the dual core processor the doubling of core lead to doubling of performance in the same clock cycle. Intel core 2 duo was the ultimate version of dual core processors. The same multi-core architecture was taken farther which gave birth to the Quad Core Processor, where there are two dual core processors on the same die which is equivalent of getting four microprocessors in one. The quad core processors are built on Intels 45nm manufacturing technology where hafniuminfused Hi-k transistors are used. The processor performance gets better by doubling the transistor density. The efficiency and speed of quad core processor is better than all of the previous generation processors and the cache size is also increased by up to 50 percent. Infect these new Intel Core 2 Quad Processors use the same energy but deliver even better performance.

III.

Quad Core Processor

Quad Core processor is actually two dual core processors in one chip. In Core 2 Quad processors the dies were similar to that of Core 2 Duo processor but the number of core being was doubled .There are four execution cores in one package i.e. Quad Core Processor. Here each core
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runs at lower frequency and handles incoming data strings simultaneously to improve efficiency. Its like four heads are working together, when one is executing the other three can be accessing the system bus or executing its own code. Intel Core micro-architecture makes sure that each of the four cores is executing perfectly, So that more instructions can be carried out per clock cycle. The commands executed quickly due because of shorter and wider pipelines and improved bus lanes move data throughout the system faster. This quad-core processor provides multi-core processing and more parallel computing. To utilize a quad core processor, the operating system must be able to recognize multi-threading and the software must have simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT) written into its code. SMT enables parallel multi-threading wherein the cores are served multi-threaded instructions in parallel. Without SMT the software will only recognize one core. Adobe Photoshop is an example of SMT-aware software. SMT is also used with multi-processor systems common to servers.

IV.

What is quad core? There are three components in a

processor. They are the core, the die and the package. The first one i.e. the core executes processing tasks. The second one is the silver tab we see on the top of a processor is called
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the die. The core is fitted inside the die. The two of them is fitted inside the third one i.e. the package. It is the green material capped by the heat spreader on top, and laced with pins on the bottom. It is important to know that the number of cores can scale independently of the dies.

Figure1. Here we can see the progress: One larger die is shrunk and placed with a twin on the same package. Then a single-die/dual core die is produced, and the cycle repeats ad infinitum with more cores per die.

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V.Quad Core Chip Design

There are basically two approaches to made quad core chips. The first approach is called the inelegant one aka multi chips. In this approach two processor cores is placed inside a single die. Then the two single dies are placed inside another die. The manufacturing process of dies of single processors are being improved and modified for this purpose. There three advantages of this approach. 1. This is the very first approach of

creating quad core chips. 2. 3. It created the demand for Quad Core The manufacturing cost of multi-core

processors. chip is inexpensive. There are two disadvantages of this technique. 1. It produces too much heat in CPU because the two die will radiate double heat 2. The logic used to price the chip is very expensive The other approach to make quad core chips is known as the native way or the monolithic way. In this approach of chip design four individual
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cores are fitted inside one single processor die. The benefit for the manufacturer in this case has three parts. 1. Worlds first true quad core chip is actually created in this approach 2. The heat radiation is problem is solved because of using single die. So monolithic chips run much cooler and the multi-chips. 3. The four cores can communicate with each other simultaneously at speed of the processor itself.

Figure2: in this scenario, we see that the cores on the native QC chip are capable of talking directly to one another. On the inelegant solution, while still quad core, it must endure thlag of sending information across the system bus if one half of the chip needs to talk to the other 9|Page

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VI. Quad Core Architecture

Figure 3: Quad Core Intel Processor Architecture

As we can see in the figure two cores are sharing one L2 cache therefore there are 2 caches for the four cores. The size of one L2 cache is 4MB so the total L2 cache is 8MB on the processor. The L2 memory cache is shared, meaning that both cores use the same L2 memory cache, dynamically configuring how much cache each core will take. One core may be using 3.5 MB while the other 512 KB (0.5 MB), contrasted
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to the fixed 50%-50% division used on previous dual-core CPUs. The L2 caches are connected via front-side bus (FSB) with each other. If core 1 wants share data with core 4 then it will communicate via this FSB. The FSB between the processor and the chip still runs at 1066 MHz by default as well. On Intel quad-core CPUs the Front Side Bus is used for accessing the RAM memory, other devices present on the PC and for the communication between each pair of cores. The communication between each pair of cores can be done up to 8 GB/s.

VII. Quad Core Processing

Quad core processing requires the precise union of all the components. The first stage is hardware support. Motherboards and BIOS updates need to recognize the CPU. If it cant recognize then the motherboard wont be able to tell the computer to which process it should run. Therefore the quad core must synchronize with the hardware of the computer. The next step is get recognized by the operating system. The operating system must recognize that there is more than one core inside a chip. The old operating system was not created for quad core processors so we cannot use those versions. But currently Microsoft and virtually all
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flavors of Linux distributor have fully endorsed the power of multi-core chips, allowing todays versions of Windows and Linux to support chips with two, four, eight, or even sixty four cores. The last step on the road to quad is the most important but also the hardest one. It is the software that runs on the chips. Just like the operating system the software has to recognize quad core too. When the software is capable of running in quad core processor it tells the hardware what it needs, then the hardware pass the command to the motherboard, at last the motherboard tells the processors what to do. Unfortunately the process is not as simple it seems. The concept which let a software to run in a multi-core chip is called threading. A tread is a separate processor with its own instruction and data. It divides the workload between multiple or multiple physical processors. Multi treading may need to process many different stages of a single program or it may involve many programs running at the same time. Like for example, if we are running a media player, a browser and an instant messenger at the same time. So the work load will be divided between different cores like one core will handle the media player, another browser operation and vice versa. On the other hand an application may perform many tasks at once; each task relies on another to make it work. For example if we are running a
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video game then there are character movement, background movement, artificial non playing character movement and the sound effects all runs at the same time. So multi threading divides the operation and let the video game run without any interruption almost instantly.

Two types of threading are used in quad core processing one is called broad treading and the other is called fine treading.

Figure 4 here we see the program as the red and blue lines entering the dual core processor. Its broad-threaded multi-threaded application,
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so the processor workload is simply split in half each.

In the above figure broad threading is taking place. In broad threading the workload is divided between the two cores and the processes are set to stay synchronized with each other. But since it is only designed for dual-core processors it is an inelegant solution for multi treading in a quad core processor. The horsepower provided by quad core processor is more than broad threading can use, so there is wastes of unused clock cycles. Fine-grained threading resolves these problems by optimizing the full potential and horsepower of the quad core processor. In this threading the developer carefully analyzes all the possible steps of the program at any given time and predicts hazards or interrupts. They divide the programs or each possible task by keeping these analysis and prediction in mind in order to truly maximize the horsepower of the processor. In broad threaded there are unused clock cycle and unused cores but in the fine grained threaded apps each core will always do something in every clock cycle.

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Figure 5 A fine-grain multi-threaded processes generates hundreds of individual tasks, each one directed specifically to an underutilized core As we can see in the figure each half of the processor would be receiving two sets of red and blue arrows with a lattice of processes. This is how fine grain threading is done. The Intel programmers have found the optimum solution for the threading of quad core processor. In the quad core processor each threads acts like a separate processor with its own instruction and data. Each treads acts as a uniprocessor (the following diagrams)

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Figure6a and 6b : quad core processor threading

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Figure 7: Four CPUs available in the taskbar In the taskbar CPU usage history shows four different histories as if four different computers are working. That is the exact prove of quad core multi-threading architecture.

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Quad Core Processor 2011 VIII. FEATURES AND BENEFITS OF INTEL PROCESSOR

1. Intel Wide Dynamic Execution It delivers more instructions per clock cycle which improves the execution speed and energy efficiency. Here each of the four cores can execute four full instructions simultaneously. Its new capability called Macro-Fusion combines certain common x86 instructions into a single instruction that is executed as a single entity. 2. Intel Smart Memory Access It improves system performance by optimizing the use of the available data bandwidth from the memory subsystem and hiding the latency of memory accesses. It ensures faster data transfer in close location to reduce latency and improve efficiency and speed. It also includes an instruction pointerbased prefetcher that prefetches memory contents before they are requested so they can be placed in cache and readily accessed when needed. It keeps the pipeline full and improves instruction throughput and performance.

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Intel Smart Memory Access includes an important new capability called "memory disambiguation," which increases the efficiency of out-of-order processing by providing the execution cores with the built-in intelligence to speculatively load data for instructions that are about to execute before all previous store instructions are executed. 3. Intel Advanced Smart Cache It is optimized for multi-core processors, providing higher performance with a more efficient cache subsystem. It accelerates a broad range of multimedia, encryption, scientific and financial applications by significantly improving performance when executing Intel Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction stream Multiple Data stream) Extensions (SSE/SSE2/SSE3) instructions.

4. Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost Intel HD Boost, implemented on 45nm processors, offers new Intel Streaming SIMD Extension 4 (Intel SSE4) instructions for even greater multimedia performance and faster high definition video editing and encoding.

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5. Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) It allows one hardware platform to function as multiple virtual platforms. Intel VT improves manageability, limiting downtime and maintaining worker productivity by isolating computing activities into separate partitions. 6. Intel 64 Architecture It allows the processor to access larger amounts of memory. Intel 64 architecture improves performance by allowing systems to address more than 4 gigabytes (GB) of both virtual and physical memory. 7. Execute Disable Bit It provides extended virus defense when deployed with a supported operating system. 8. Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS) It provides for more efficient processor and platform thermal control improving system acoustics. 9. Intel Intelligent Power Capability It is designed to reduce power consumption and design requirements. This feature manages the runtime power consumption of all the processor's execution cores. 10. Intel Designed Thermal Solution for Boxed processors
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This includes a 4-pin connector for fan speed control to help minimize the acoustic noise levels generated from running the fan at higher speeds for thermal performance. Fan speed control technology is based on actual CPU temperature and power usage.

IX. Conclusions:
"Kentsfield" was the first quad core processor. After that Quad core processors have evolved many times since its invention. The latest Intel core 2 quad processors provides an evolving set of threaded multimedia applications, including digital content creation will shine as users are able to complete tasks faster. Game play can achieve even greater visualization and realism as tasks such as artificial intelligence (AI), physics and rendering can be distributed across each of the four complete execution cores and run in parallel. With all these features multitasking environments can be expanded like never before. Users can stream high-definition content while playing a high-frame rate game, or run multiple complex databases while developing profession content and running virus protection software in the background.

X.

Reference:

Retrieved August 20, 2011, from: http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/quad_core/ (all the web images)

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