Paul DeMone van RealWorld Technologies heeft het vervolg op zijn Intel Willamette artikel online gezet. In dit tweede deel krijgen we een technisch verhaal over de Willamette en features zoals de trace cache en de double pumped ALU. Wie daar gaan trek in heeft kan meteen naar pagina 7 skippen, waar Paul zijn voorzichtige verwachtingen over de performance van Willy uitspreekt:
I would go so far as estimate that Willamette might achieve 20 to 30% higher performance than P6 on a clock for clock basis on most integer code. Including the 50% or more higher clock rate, that is equivalent to an absolute integer performance approaching twice that of the P6 in the same manufacturing process. That increase seems staggering, but it is much less, for example, than the over three times higher system bus bandwidth advantage Willamette enjoys over current P6 implementations. On memory performance limited code the Willamette might dominate the P6 even more.The Willamette is a serious threat to end the success AMD has been enjoying with its K7 Athlon device in the high end of the x86 processor marketplace. It will likely support clock frequencies about 50% higher than P6 and 30% higher than K7 in a similar process (although AMD will soon benefit from a switchover to a copper interconnect based 0.18 um). Everything else being equal, Willamette will likely enjoy at least a similar level of clock normalized performance or IPC advantage running general purpose integer code over K7 that the K7 enjoys over the P6 core. The Willamette will likely be larger than the K7 core in similar processes, although not dramatically so. The trace cache occupies a great deal more area than the 16 Kbyte I-cache in the P6 and maybe 50% or more area than the 64 KB I-cache in the K7. However, this is balanced by the fact that Willamette likely devotes less area to x86 instruction parsing, alignment and decoding than the K7 or even the P6. Willamette runs at very high clock rates and will likely consume at least twice as much power as P6, or somewhere in region of 60 Watts or more
