Christopher A. Poirier

Power and temperature control on a 90-nm Itanium family processor

This paper describes the embedded feedback and control system on a 90-nm Itanium family processor, code-named Montecito, that maximizes performance while staying within a target power and temperature (PT) envelope. This system, referred to as Foxton Technology (FT), utilizes on-chip sensors and an embedded microcontroller to measure PT and modulate both voltage and frequency (VF) to optimize performance while meeting PT constraints. Changing both VF takes advantage of the cubic relationship of P/spl prop/CV/sup 2/F. We present measured results that show a 31% reduction in power for only a 10% drop in frequency. Montecito is able to implement FT using only 0.5% of the die area and 0.5% of the die power.

A 32 nm, 3.1 Billion Transistor, 12 Wide Issue Itanium® Processor for Mission-Critical Servers

The next generation in the Intel^® Itanium^® processor family, code named Poulson, has eight multi-threaded 64 bit cores. Poulson is socket compatible with the current Intel® Itanium^® Processor 9300 series (Tukwila). The new design integrates a ring-based system interface derived from portions of previous Xeon^® and Itanium^® processors, and includes 32MB of Last Level Cache (LLC). The processor is designed in Intel^®s 32nm CMOS technology utilizing high-K dielectric metal gate transistors combined with nine layers of copper interconnect. The 18.2x29.9mm² die contains 3.1 billion transistors, with 720 million allocated to the eight cores. A total of 54MB of on die cache is distributed throughout the core and system interface. Poulson implements twice as many cores as Tukwila while lowering the thermal design power (TDP) by 15Wto 170W and increases the top frequency of the I/O and memory inter faces by 50% to 6.4GT/s.

Power and temperature control on a 90nm Itanium/sup /spl reg//-family processor

This paper describes the embedded feedback and control system on a 90 nm Itanium/spl reg/-family processor, code-named Montecito, that maximizes performance while staying within a target power and temperature (PT) envelope. This system utilizes on-chip sensors and an embedded micro-controller to measure PT and modulate voltage and frequency to meet PT constraints.