The Power5+ Processor - IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 Technical Overview And Introduction

2.1 The POWER5+ processor

The IBM POWER5+ processor capitalizes all the enhancements brought by the POWER5™
processor. For a detailed description of the POWER5 processor, refer to IBM IntelliStation
POWER 285 Technical Overview and Introduction, REDP-4078. Figure 2-2 shows a
high-level view of the POWER5+ processor.
L3
Bus
Mem
Bus
Figure 2-2 Power5+ processor
The CMOS10S technology in the POWER5+ processor uses a 90 nm fabrication process,
which enables:
Performance gains through faster clock rates
Processor size reduction (243 mm compared with 389 mm)
The POWER5+ processor is 37% smaller than the POWER5 processor. It consumes less
power and requires less sophisticated cooling. Thus, you can use the POWER5+ processor
in servers where previously you could only use low frequency processors because of cooling
restrictions.
The POWER5+ design provides the following additional enhancements:
New page sizes added in ERAT and TLB
Two new pages sizes (64 KB and 16 GB) were recently added in PowerPC® architecture.
A new segment size available in SLB
One new 1 TB segment size was recently added in PowerPC architecture.
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IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 Technical Overview and Introduction
POWER 5+ Processor
Core Core
2.1 GHz 2.1 GHz
L3
1.9 MB L2
Intf
Enhanced Distributed Switch
Mem
(Fabric Bus Controller)
Cntrl
Vertical
Fabric
GX+
Core Core Intf
2.1 GHz 2.1 GHz
Bus
GX+
Bus
SMP
Fabric
Bus