25112 Rev. 3.06 September 2005

Software Optimization Guide for AMD64 Processors

A.2 Microarchitecture for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ Processors

The AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Opteron processors implement the AMD64 instruction set by means of micro-ops—simple fixed-length operations designed to include direct support for AMD64 instructions and adhere to the high-performance principles of fixed-length encoding, regularized instruction fields, and a large register set. The enhanced microarchitecture enables higher processor core performance and promotes straightforward extensibility for future designs.

A.3 Superscalar Processor

The AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Opteron processors are aggressive, out-of-order, three-way superscalar AMD64 processors. They can fetch, decode, and issue up to three AMD64 instructions per cycle with a centralized instruction control unit (ICU) and two independent instruction schedulers—an integer scheduler and a floating-point scheduler. These two schedulers can simultaneously issue up to nine micro-ops to the three general-purpose integer execution units (ALUs), three address-generation units (AGUs), and three floating-point execution units. The processors move integer instructions down the integer execution pipeline, which consists of the integer scheduler and the ALUs, as shown in Figure 6 on page 252. Floating-point instructions are handled by the floating-point execution pipeline, which consists of the floating-point scheduler and the floating-point execution units.

A.4 Processor Block Diagram

A block diagram of the AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Opteron processors is shown in Figure 6 on page 252.

Appendix A Microarchitecture for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ Processors

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AMD 250 manual Superscalar Processor, Processor Block Diagram, 251