Modern Processor and System Architectures

In this lecture we look at examples of current processors and systems. Of particular interest are the techniques used by processor architects to achieve high performance.

The first example is an illustration of the basic block diagram of the Pentium processor (from laynetworks.com).

Next we have illustrations of the overall PC system architecture showing the various buses and the bridge chips that connect them together (from zdnet.com).

Another example, this time for the Mac Powerbook is (from apple.com)

You might like to compare the previous two modern architectures with the architecture of the Sun SPARCstation 10 from 10 or more years ago. The processor is the box in the upper left labeled EMC (from sun.com).

The Pentium chip has evolved a great deal in the 15 or so years since it was introduced. This article has a nice overview comparison of the latest multicore Pentium Core 2 chip architecture with that of the Pentium D multicore architecture that preceded it.

Here is an illustration of the Core architecture in detail--the current state of the art in the Pentium line. You can see the large number of functional units that can each be processing an instruction during a single clock cycle (from realworldtech.com).

Finally, to give you a better understandin;g of the effect of caches on system performance, take a look the memory access performance graphs near the bottom of this article.