Power-Management Architecture of the Intel Microarchitecture Code-Named Sandy Bridge

Modern microprocessors are evolving into system-on-a-chip designs with high integration levels, catering to ever-shrinking form factors. Portability without compromising performance is a driving market need. An architectural approach that's adaptive to and cognizant of workload behavior and platform physical constraints is indispensable to meeting these performance and efficiency goals. This article describes power-management innovations introduced on Intel's Sandy Bridge microprocessor.

I Sandy Bridge Redesign

We significantly redesigned Sandy Bridge from the previous generation, providing increased instruction-level parallelism and multithreading capabilities and improved power management and energy efficiency. We also introd uced several architectural changes, most notably the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extension (AVX).