I. Introduction
Over the years, IBM POWER**Trademark, service mark, or registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. processors [1]– [5] have delivered many innovations to the marketplace, including the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture, advanced branch prediction, out-of-order execution, data prefetching, simultaneous multi-threading, dual-core chips, core accelerators [5], on-chip high-bandwidth memory-controllers, and highly scalable SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) interconnects. In this eighth-generation POWER processor [6] [7], IBM continues the tradition of innovation by introducing a balanced, 12-core multi-chip design, with large on-chip eDRAM (embedded dynamic random access memory) caches and high-performance eight-way multithreaded cores.