Intel's Redwood Cove: Baby Steps Are Still Steps

Intel's Redwood Cove architecture represents a modest upgrade from its predecessor, Raptor Cove, which itself was similar to Golden Cove. The enhancements in Redwood Cove include improved branch prediction, a larger L1 instruction cache, and better instruction fusion capabilities. The architecture maintains the core structure sizes from previous generations but introduces optimizations that enhance performance, particularly in instruction fetch and decode stages. Notably, the L1 instruction cache capacity has doubled to 64 KB, and the micro-op queue size has increased to 192 entries, allowing for more efficient handling of instructions. Additionally, Redwood Cove recognizes branch hint prefixes, which can improve instruction flow. The backend remains largely unchanged, but the floating-point multiplication latency has been reduced to three cycles, aligning with competitive architectures. Overall, while the changes are incremental, they reflect Intel's cautious approach to evolving its CPU designs, focusing on stability and gradual performance improvements.

- Redwood Cove is a minor upgrade over Raptor Cove, maintaining core structure sizes.

- Key improvements include better branch prediction, a larger L1 instruction cache, and enhanced instruction fusion.

- The micro-op queue size has increased to 192 entries, improving instruction handling efficiency.

- Floating-point multiplication latency has been reduced to three cycles.

- Intel's approach emphasizes stability and gradual performance enhancements in its CPU architecture.