Intel's mission with the efficiency core (E-Core), which is based off the Atom Gracemont architecture (though Intel has dispensed with the 'Atom' branding) was to create a highly scalable architecture optimized for multi-core performance-per-watt. The engineers set an aggressive silicon area target, meaning they aimed to pack as many cores with as much performance as possible into a small footprint, and set out to deliver more IPC than Skylake within a lower power envelope. We'll jump ahead here and show you Intel's claimed results, and then show you how Intel got there. As with all vendor-provided benchmarks, view these with the appropriate skepticism.
The latency performance chart, which quantifies single-threaded performance, is first up. First, be aware that Intel tested with the SPECrate2017_int_base test for these results, meaning the test represents performance with integer workloads, not floating point. For the single-threaded test, Intel disabled hyperthreading on an undisclosed Skylake processor (likely first gen) and measured performance against a single Gracemont core, which doesn't support hyper-threading. That means we're looking at a pure single-core benchmark for both processors. Gracemont provided 40% (or more) performance at the same power (ISO power) as the Skylake chip, or provided the same level of performance (ISO performance) at less than 40% of the power. That means that the Skylake core consumed 2.5 times more power to give the same level of performance as the Gracemont core.
The throughput performance test measures performance spread over multiple threads, with four single-thread Gracemont cores facing off with two threaded Skylake cores (for a total of four threads). Here Gracemont delivers 80% more performance while consuming less power, or the same throughput at 80% less power. That means Skylake needed five times the power for the same performance in threaded work, which is impressive indeed.
It's worth nothing that threading tends to only deliver about ~20-30% more performance, so the Skylake chip is at a disadvantage, though it only pays about a 5% penalty in die area to add threading. To even this out, consider that the four Gracemont cores fit into the same footprint as a single Skylake core, meaning that Gracemont not only wins on all counts in these integer workloads, but its area efficiency is vastly superior. Net net, according to Inntel, Gracemont exceeds Skylake's core performance while consuming less power in a far smaller footprint. Here's how they did it.
From the highest of levels, Intel designed Gracemont with a deeper front end with on-demand length decode paired with a wider back end with more execution ports. The design supports vector and AI instructions, like VNNI and AVX-256, but doesn't support AVX-512. Additionally, Intel aimed for a wide dynamic frequency range to maximize the effective range of the processor.
Intel increased branch prediction accuracy by switching to a 5,000-entry branch target cache. Additionally, Intel says its new 'long' history-based branch prediction system helps to generate accurate instruction pointers, which then allows discovery and correction of instruction cache misses before they become critical to program execution. The front end also has a 64KB instruction cache to keep instructions close, thus saving power. The chips also have Intel's first on-demand instruction length decoder, which generates pre-decode information that is then stored alongside the instruction cache. This provides a history of previous instructions that allows 'familiar' code to bypass the length decoder to save energy.
The out-of-order decoder has a clustered design with dual three-wide decoders. This allows for decoding up to six instructions per cycle while, according to Intel, maintaining comparable energy efficiency to a narrower design. The unit also has hardware-driven load balancing to ensure parallelism.
The back end has a five-wide allocation and eight-wide retire, along with a 256 entry out-of-order window that helps to promote parallelism. That's fed to 17 execution ports. Intel says this arrangement delivers more integer IPC than Skylake, but at a fraction of the power.
There are four general-purpose integer execution ports with dual integer multipliers and dividers that can resolve two branches per cycle. To the far right we can see the three SIMD ALUs with the integer multiplier (IMUL) that's used for Intel's VNNI instructions. The two symmetric floating point pipelines can do two independent add or multiply operations, and can also do two FP multiply/add operations per cycle via vector extensions. We can also see the AES and SHA acceleration engines in the same stack.
Moving down to the memory subsystem, we can see dual load and dual store pipelines that support 32KB read and write bandwidth simultaneously. The L2 cache is shared among all four cores, with 2MB for consumer chips and 4MB for data center models. This feeds the cores with 64 bytes of read bandwidth per cycle at 17 cycles of latency.
Intel also touts Alder's modern instruction set with Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), VT-rp, support for vector instructions (up to AVX-512), and AVX2 VNNI, which uses FP16 instructions to impart a 2X performance gain in integer AI throughput.
Gracemont's focus on area efficiency allows Intel to, for a lack of a better term, spam cores. Intel can essentially just drop in lots of four-core clusters to pack a lot of compute into a very small area and the low switching energy per instruction maximizes power-constrained throughput in heavily-threaded workloads. This is enabled by a reduced operating voltage that not only saves power (voltage is the most important factor here), but also provides headroom for higher frequencies for on-demand peak performance.
