The Rapid Execution Engine
The above picture is actually showing all execution units of Pentium 4, including the 'Rapid Execution Engine' as well as the 'not-so-rapid' execution units. While Intel is only talking about the four fast execution units, the other four are the actual units that are responsible for Pentium 4's peculiar behavior in the benchmarks.
Basic part of the 'Rapid Execution Engine' are the two 'double-pumped' ALUs and AGUs. Each of the four is said to be clocked with double the processors clock, because they can receive a µOP every half clock. Intel never disclosed if those units are now indeed clocked with twice the processor clock or if each of those units is in reality consisting of two identical sub-units running at normal clock that can merely receive the µOPs alternately every half clock. It doesn't really matter which of the two is actually true, because the result is the same. Simple µOPs that can be processed by the Rapid Execution Engine are executed in half a clock, which is obviously a very good thing.
The story looks a lot different for the instructions that cannot be processed by the rapid execution units. Those instructions or µOPs need to use the one and only 'Slow ALU', which is not 'double pumped'. The majority of instructions needs to use this path, which obviously sounds scary. However, the majority of code is in actual fact consisting of the most simple 'AND', 'OR', 'XOR', 'ADD', .... Instructions, making Intel's 'Rapid Execution Engine'-design sensible though not particularly amazing.
Things look worse if you have a look at the red boxes, which represent the FPU-part of Pentium 4. Please take the time and compare this part to the Pentium III block diagram. You will see that Intel has actually castrated quite a bit of the SSE/MMX part of Pentium 4. Pentium III used to have two MMX and two SSE units, but Pentium 4 has only got one of each. Intel claims that additional units would not have improved the SSE/SSE2, MMX or FPU performance. However, our benchmark results speak a different language.
SSE2 - The New Double Precision Streaming SIMD Extensions
To conclude this epic piece about Pentium 4's internal architecture I need not forget to mention SSE2. 144 new instructions are finally enabling everything that SSE was expected to be in the first place. The 128-bit of packed data, which could only be in form of four single-precision floating-point values under SSE can now be operated in all of the following options:
- 4 single precision FP values (SSE)
- 2 double precision FP values (SSE2)
- 16 byte values (SSE2)
- 8 word values (SSE2)
- 4 double word values (SSE2)
- 2 quad word values (SSE2)
- 1 128-bit integer value (SSE2)
The options are vast and the usefulness undoubted. Intel hopes that software developers will soon replace the old x87-FPU-instructions with the double-precision FP instructions of SSE2, so that Intel's currently false claim that Pentium 4 has the most powerful FPU finally becomes reality. AMD is very impressed with SSE2 as well, which is why it announced to us only a few days ago that the upcoming Hammer-line of x86-64 processors will include SSE2 as well.
I personally have my doubts if SSE2 will be able to replace x87-instructions in scientific software. We should not forget that the original FPU is using 80-bit FP-values, not the less exact 64-bit FP-values offered by SSE2.
