SSE Technology In New Intel Prescott Processors

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Just got word that Lev Dymchenko at Xbitlabs has posted his 8 page editorial looking at SSE technology that's going to be implemented when Intel's new Prescott Processors are released. Here's a snip:

In our detailed technology coverage we are talking about the SSE technology implemented in new Intel Prescott processors, its exciting history, its peculiarities and advantages offered to the software developers. Also we are going to compare the cons and pros of the new SSE instructions with AMD x86-64.

At the last Intel Developer Forum the new PC processor from Intel was officially introduced to the public (see this news story for more information on the new solution). It is a next generation processor, manufactured with 90nm technology. This allows clocking it at up to 4-5GHz frequencies. The new manufacturing process must have made it economically justifiable to increase the L2 cache up to 1MB as well as the L1 cache: its size was doubled. The FSB frequency grew to 800MHz. Overall, nearly every unit of the CPU has been somehow improved. But what does this polished-off product bring to software developers? A larger cache is a good thing: you worry less about the speed of reading/writing into memory, which often becomes a limiting factor. But this doesn?t eliminate all problems; when there are a lot of data, even a double-sized cache won?t help much.

The higher speed of the front-side bus suggests that the new Intel?s processor will be rather well-balanced, free from evident bottlenecks, unlike some previous processor models, which didn?t give us performance growth proportional to their frequency growth.

SSE Technology In New Intel Prescott Processors