Intel Technology Journal publishes an article, where the authors introduce the 45 nm Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture and discuss improvements in SSE4.1 instructions, larger caches, faster divide techniques, and better load balancing across cache boundaries.
Abstract of the Paper:
The 45nm Intel® Core™2 family of processors, codename PenrynΔ, improves upon the performance of Intel Core 2 processors through new microarchitecture features, a larger cache, new instructions, and enhanced power- and thermal-management schemes. This paper presents measured performance data that show the microarchitectural benefits of the Penryn family of processors on key applications and benchmarks. In addition, this paper showcases performance improvements achieved by new SSE4 instructions on a variety of media, imaging, and 3D workloads. The Penryn family of processors also introduced new power- and thermal-management schemes. This paper discusses performance improvements achieved by these enhanced thermal-management features in thermally limited platforms such as mobile thin and light and small form-factor computers.
