학술논문

The 24-Core POWER9 Processor With Adaptive Clocking, 25-Gb/s Accelerator Links, and 16-Gb/s PCIe Gen4
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of. 53(1):91-101 Jan, 2018
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Computing and Processing
Clocks
Bandwidth
Voltage control
Ports (Computers)
Transistors
Monitoring
Switched mode power supplies
Adaptive clocking
clock distribution
microprocessor
resonant clocking
voltage domains
voltage regulator
Language
ISSN
0018-9200
1558-173X
Abstract
The POWER9TM family of chips is fabricated in 14-nm silicon-on-insulator finFET technology using 17 levels of copper interconnect. The 695-mm 2 24-core microprocessor features a new core based on an execution slice microarchitecture. The chip contains 8 billion transistors and has 120 MB of eDRAM L3 cache. The processor features an adaptive clock strategy to reduce timing margin needed during power supply droop events by embedding analog voltage-droop monitors that direct a digital phase-locked loop to immediately reduce clock frequency in response to a droop event. The scale-out chip IO subsystem supports up to 300-GB/s accelerator bandwidth using new 25-Gb/s links, 48 lanes of PCIeGen4 totaling 192 GB/s, eight ports of 2667 MT/s DDR4, and 256 GB/s of symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) interconnect. The scale-up chip adds additional SMP bandwidth and replaces the DDR4 memory interface with eight ports of differential memory interfaces with 230 GB/s of bandwidth resulting in 12.9 Tb/s of total off-chip bandwidth.