Hp &Intel

What is a micro architecture?

It's no secret anymore that Intel’s new Core 2 Duo processor crushes its predecessors and competitors. How did Intel manage to design a processor that is so much faster than their current chips and is also much more power efficient? The answer can be found in a new brand new micro architecture, which forms the base for Intel’s newest processors for desktops, laptops and servers. In this article we explain how the new core micro architecture differs from previous CPU architectures.

Looking at financial reserves, the amount of employees, the annual turnover and the means of productions, we must conclude that Intel is at least ten times bigger than their main competitor AMD. Nevertheless the underdog has succeeded in conquering Intel with faster processors for several years now. Nobody can deny that AMD's Athlon 64 processors are quite a bit faster then Intel’s Pentiums. Besides faster the AMD processors are a lot more energy efficient than Intel’s Pentium 4's en D's. Although over the years Intel has been adding many new features to their Pentium design, they finally decided that a radical change was needed to increase performance and decrease power usage in the long term. It looks like that radical change worked out, because our benchmarks prove that the first processor based on the new micro architecture, the Core 2 Duo, literally crushes its competitors.

The Core 2 Duo is the first Intel processor based on the new core micro architecture.

What is a micro architecture?

The new generation Intel processors are brand new, but on the other hand they are not. The underlying architecture named x86 is still the same. This architecture defines which kind of instructions the processor can execute and the way the processor can be accessed, i.e. which software can be used. Although the x86 architecture had been around since the 80's and it is still possible to use 25 year old software on a brand new PC, both Intel and AMD have been continuously expanding the x86 instruction set, for instance with special MMX, SSE and x86-64 instructions. A micro architecture is the hardware implementation of such an architecture. So while AMD and Intel processors are based on the exact same x86 architecture and are therefore 100% compatible, their inner working is completely different due to different micro architectures.

The last time Intel introduced a new micro architecture for desktop processors was in 2000 with the introduction of the Pentium 4 processor. This micro architecture of the original Pentium 4 and all its successors was called NetBurst. Before that the Pentium Pro, II and III were based on the P6 micro architecture, while the P5 micro architecture was the foundation for the first Pentium processors. The Pentium M processors that Intel introduced in 2002 were founded on a different micro architecture as the Pentium 4, mostly based on the P6.

The relation between architecture, micro architecture and processors.