Nvidia Reveals Details on 64-Bit Project Denver Chip

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Over at the Nvidia Blog, Nick Stam writes that the company revealed new architectural details of the 64-bit version of Project Denver at the HOT CHIPS conference this week.

Denver-Hot-Chips-Core

Denver is designed for the highest single-core CPU throughput, and also delivers industry-leading dual-core performance. Each of the two Denver cores implements a 7-way superscalar microarchitecture (up to 7 concurrent micro-ops can be executed per clock), and includes a 128KB 4-way L1 instruction cache, a 64KB 4-way L1 data cache, and a 2MB 16-way L2 cache, which services both cores. Denver implements an innovative process called Dynamic Code Optimization, which optimizes frequently used software routines at runtime into dense, highly tuned microcode-equivalent routines. These are stored in a dedicated, 128MB main-memory-based optimization cache. After being read into the instruction cache, the optimized micro-ops are executed, re-fetched and executed from the instruction cache as long as needed and capacity allows.

While Denver is described as a Mobile chip, Stam claims that its performance will rival some mainstream PC-class CPUs at significantly reduced power consumption. That sounds to me like an interesting building block for HPC clusters.

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