Intel Sandy Bridge. Microarchitecture

Core Microarchitecture — summary

So, we went across all the blocks of the processor, only one thing left is to put them all together — Sandy Bridge microarchitecture:

Yellow indicates new processor components. As we see, changes have affected all parts, starting from initial data processing to instruction execution.

Let’s try to summarize all the optimization done to processor part of Sandy Bridge and also mention some points that haven’t been shown on slides:

• Microarchitecture improvements
  • Performance boost
  • Less power drawn
  • Best performance per watt number
• Architecture extension and enhancement
  • Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX): improvements over floating point operations, new abilities for solving compute-intensive tasks using 256-bit instructions
  • Increased speed of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), RSA and SHA algorithms
  • Server instruction optimization