Inside the Machine

Core 2 Duo

The Intel Core microarchitecture introduced in the Core 2 Duo line of processors represents Intel’s most ambitious attempt since the Pentium Pro to increase single-threaded performance independently of clockspeeds. Because its designers took a “more hardware” instead of “more clockspeed” approach to performance, Core is bigger and wider than just about any mass-market design that has come before it (see Table 12-3). Indeed, this “more of everything” is readily apparent with a glance at the diagram of the new microarchitecture in Figure 12-10.

In every phase of Core’s 14-stage pipeline, there is more of just about anything you could think of: more decoding logic, more re-order buffer space, more reservation station entries, more issue ...