Questions to the author (or anyone else who's understood what I have not)
1) How's the loop detection feature know when it is a loop ? The diagrams posted don't show any connection between it and the 'front' of the pipeline, so how can it know that the next operation is the same if it hasn't yet entered the loop?
2) On page 8 there's a diagram with a 4 socket setup showing 2 io hubs. Are they connected to the same pcie bus and whatever else they interface with? or are only 2 of the sockets able to directly access a given resource?
3) With the modular design, would one risk buying a cpu that doesn't work in a motherboard because it is intended for a 2 or 4 socket system? or are they all the same, simply with some qpi's disabled?
4) Am I right assuming that qpi replaces fsb when it has to communicate with an i/o hub only? (as shown in one of the top diagrams on page 8) Or is it used for every one of the 'blue' lines on the lower diagram (10 total in a 4 socket layout). The latter would mean 4 qpi's are barely enough to satisfy bandwidth needs in a server enviroment. I imagine an esx server with 4 processors (32 threads) can easily demand memory from dram pools not linked to the local core the threads are running on, and use 96GB/s (3x32) of the 102GB/s (4x12,8x2) total theoretical bandwidth in addition to some of the local 32GB/s bandwidth from the socket a given core/thread is running on. So if this scenario is correct, is it possible to increase the speed of the qpi (read: oc the link) to increase available bandwidth? And what happends if one would successfully find ddr3-1600 modules that would run within the 1,65v limitation? Wouldn't that mean the qpi was already at its limit? (38,4GB/s per dram pool x 3 sockets not local to the core that runs a thread). I know memory isn't truely the bottleneck in modern computers, but I still find it wierd that they put so much effort into the memory controller if it isn't actually the problem. Simply adding a few qpi links between the sockets and the chipset would've solved the bandwidth issue without limiting usable memory types by choosing a certain cpu. Sure it wouldn't have improved latencies, but honestly, who cares? neither in a gaming pc, netbook or any number of common server configurations is it the memory lantecy that is the bottleneck.
5) How much time should one assume is wasted when a core on conroe flushes the l2 cache? they seem to have solved the issue and as consequence increased cache latency (which should turn into slower overall cache performance). In english : can we expect any gain from this change?
6) Would the immensely increased tlb size improve performance in newer games which precache loads of data? (thinking quicker retrieval of texture data etc)
7) Page 12 mentions unalligned memory access, which I've never heard of before. Appearently compilers already try to avoid this situation, so can we expect the improvement to handling such to be of interest? What's the point of improving a feature to handle a situation that hardly ever arises in the first place?
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