Revision as of 22:28, 13 April 2016

Broadwell (BDW) is Intel's microarchitecture based on the 14 nm process for mobile, desktops, and servers. Introduced in early 2015, Broadwell is a process shrink of Haswell which introduced several enhancements. Broadwell is named after Broadwell, Illinois.

Codenames

Architecture

Broadwell is for the most part identical to Haswell with several enhancements.

Key changes from Haswell

• ~5% IPC improvement
• FP multiplication instructions has reduced latency (3 cycles, down from 5)
  • Affects AVX, SSE, and FP instructions
• CLMUL instructions are now a single μop, improving latency and throughput
• The second-level TLB (STLB)
  • Table was enlarged (1,536 entries, up from 1024)
  • 1GB page mode (16 entries, 4-ways set associative)
• Larger out-of-order scheduler
• Faster store-to-load forwarding
• Address prediction for branches and returns was improved
• Improved cryptography acceleration instructions

Core features maintained a 2:1 ratio of performance:power.

Graphics

• 50% higher sampler throughput
• Improvements for increased geometry, Z, Pixel Fill
• Direct X 11.2, OpenGL 4.3
• OpenCL 1.2 and 2.0 (with Shared Virtual Memory)
• Up to 24 EUs (20% addition, up from 20 in Haswell), 48 EUs on Iris Pro Graphics

Block Diagram

Memory Hierarchy

• Cache
  • Hardware prefetchers
  • L1 Cache:
    • 32 KB 8-way set associative instruction, 64 B line size
    • 32 KB 8-way set associative data, 64 B line size
    • Write-back policy
    • Per core
  • L2 Cache:
    • 256 KB 8-way set associative, 64 B line size
    • Write-back policy
    • Per core
  • L3 Cache:
    • 1.5 MB
  • L4 Cache:
    • 128 MB
    • eDRAM
    • shared with GPU (Crystal Well)
    • Iris Pro models only