1–4
Introduction
29 September 1997 – Subject To Change
21164PC Microprocessor Features
•
VAX floating-point formats
–
F_floating
–
G_floating
–
D_floating (limited support)
1.2 21164PC Microprocessor Features
The 21164PC is a superscalar pipelined processor manufactured using 0.35-µm
CMOS technology. It is packaged in a 413-pin IPGA carrier and has removable
application-specific heat sinks. The 21164PC has been optimized for uniprocessor
systems with very high cache and memory bandwidth. The 21164PC supports the
new motion video instructions (MVI) added to the Alpha instruction set.
The 21164PC can issue four Alpha instructions in a single cycle, thereby minimizing
the average cycles per instruction (CPI). A number of low-latency and/or high-
throughput features in the instruction issue unit and the onchip components of the
memory subsystem further reduce the average CPI.
The 21164PC and associated PALcode implements IEEE single-precision and dou-
ble-precision, VAX F_floating and G_floating data types, and supports longword
(32-bit) and quadword (64-bit) integers. Byte (8-bit) and word (16-bit) support is
provided by byte-manipulation instructions. Limited hardware support is provided
for the VAX D_floating data type.
Other 21164PC features include:
•
A peak instruction execution rate of four times the CPU clock frequency.
•
The ability to issue up to four instructions during each clock cycle.
•
An onchip, demand-paged memory-management unit with translation buffer,
which, when used with PALcode, can implement a variety of page table struc-
tures and translation algorithms. The unit consists of a 64-entry data translation
buffer (DTB) and a 48-entry instruction translation buffer (ITB), with each entry
able to map a single 8KB page or a group of 8, 64, or 512 8KB pages. The size of
each translation buffer entry’s group is specified by hint bits stored in the entry.
The DTB and ITB implement 7-bit address space numbers (ASN),
(MAX_ASN=127).
•
Two onchip, high-throughput pipelined floating-point units, capable of execut-
ing both DIGITAL and IEEE floating-point data types.
•
An onchip, 16KB virtual instruction cache with 7-bit ASNs (MAX_ASN=127).