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Polaris µarch
General Info
Arch Type	CPU
Designer	Intel
Manufacturer	Intel
Introduction	February 2007
Process	65 nm
Core Configs	80
Pipeline
Type	VLIW
Stages	9
Cache
L1I Cache	3 KiB/core
L1D Cache	2 KiB/core
Succession
Larrabee

Polaris was a research microarchitecture designed by Intel Labs demonstarting the theoretical capabilities of a many-core chip performing 1 trillion floating point operations.

History

Intel originally announced and presented a Polaris wafer at the September 2006 Intel Developer Forum. Technical details were finally presented at IEEE ISSCC 2007. It was a concept project designed to demonstrate the potential of integrating many processing elements on a single silicon chip enabled by Moore's Law in order to achieve a high trillion floating point operations throughput. Polaris was Intel's first public chip as a direct consequence of their Tera-scale Computing Research Program and is the basis of Intel's later research projects which paved the way for Intel's Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture and the Xeon Phi many-core processor family.

Architecture

• network on a chip (NoC)
• 80 cores ("tiles")
  • operating at 4 GHz
  • arranged as 10x8 2D mesh

Die

Two different versions of the die were presented at a few different events. The exact difference is not known.

Variant 1

SoC

• Package LGA-1248
  • 14 layers
  • 343 signal pins
• 65 nm process
  • 1 poly, 8 metal (Cu) layers
• 21.72 mm x 12.64 mm
  • 274.54 mm² die size
• 100,000,000 transistors

Tile

• 1.5 mm x 2.0 mm
• 3 mm² die size

Variant 2

Chip

• 65 nm process
  • 1 poly, 8 metal (Cu) layers
• 22 mm x 13.75
• 302.5 mm² die size

Tile

Documents

• Teraflops Research Chip
• Tera Tera Tera, 2006
• Polaris, MPSoC 2007
• Aim High, Intel Technical Update, Teratec ’07 Symposium, June 20, 2007

References

• Intel Developer Forum, September 2006
• IEEE ISSCC 2007