X-bit labs

Intel Developer Forum Spring 2005: Day 2 Coverage (page 13)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 03/02/2005 | 11:53 PM ]

Thermal Management of Dual Core Solutions

From the thermal management prospective Intel did introduce the same features as those that we have already seen in the recently announced Pentium 6xx processors.

You should keep I mind however that power dissipation of each processor is determined by a number of things and one of them is the type of instructions that are run on that particular core. So there is no relation between the two cores as far as the amount of power to be dissipated by each of them is concerned. They can both be at the maximum or they can both be idle, or in between. And this will change continuously because the instructions will change continuously.

The fan speed control and temperature monitoring will be managed by an on-die thermal diode. The monolithic processors in the desktop field will have a single diode. For the server environment Intel will be providing two thermal diodes, because servers need to monitor more temperatures in the system and more areas.

Among the features already introduced in the 6xx series CPUs are:

• Dynamic Voltage Identification
• Intel SpeedStep technology
• Halt State (C1) and Enhanced Halt State (C1E)

We have already discussed them in detail in our article called Intel Pentium 4 6XX and Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz CPU Review.

You should however keep in mind that there are specific voltage restrictions that would apply to the dual core processors:

Dual Core Glossary

HyperThreading is 2 threads running on the same execution core that share processor resources, execution resources and cache hierarchy.

Dual Core is defined as 2 execution cores in the same processor package

Multi-Core is two or more execution cores in the same processor package.

The only thing that is shared in the dual core environment is the system bus, they don’t share the cache, they have their own execution engines, and in terms of software and hardware this is very similar to dual-processing: whether you have two single cores on two sockets or one socket with 2 execution cores, it looks the same and behaves the same as dual-processing.

Dual-Processing or Multi-Processing is defined as 2 or more processors in the same system. And the only thing they share is the system bus and the benefit comes from the use of more sockets which multiplies the execution resources and you get higher performance.