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Concept
POWER3
Summary
The POWER3 is a microprocessor, designed and exclusively manufactured by IBM, that implemented the 64-bit version of the PowerPC instruction set architecture (ISA), including all of the optional instructions of the ISA (at the time) such as instructions present in the POWER2 version of the POWER ISA but not in the PowerPC ISA. It was introduced on 5 October 1998, debuting in the RS/6000 43P Model 260, a high-end graphics workstation. The POWER3 was originally supposed to be called the PowerPC 630 but was renamed, probably to differentiate the server-oriented POWER processors it replaced from the more consumer-oriented 32-bit PowerPCs. The POWER3 was the successor of the P2SC derivative of the POWER2 and completed IBM's long-delayed transition from POWER to PowerPC, which was originally scheduled to conclude in 1995. The POWER3 was used in IBM RS/6000 servers and workstations at 200 MHz. It competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha 21264 and the Hewlett-Packard (HP) PA-8500.
The POWER3 was based on the PowerPC 620, an earlier 64-bit PowerPC implementation that was late, under-performing and commercially unsuccessful. Like the PowerPC 620, the POWER3 has three fixed-point units, but the single floating-point unit (FPU) was replaced with two floating-point fused multiply–add units, and an extra load-store unit was added (for a total of two) to improve floating-point performance. The POWER3 is a superscalar design that executed instructions out of order. It has a seven-stage integer pipeline, a minimal eight-stage load/store pipeline and a ten-stage floating-point pipeline.
The front end consists of two stages: fetch and decode. During the first stage, eight instructions were fetched from a 32 KB instruction cache and placed in a 12-entry instruction buffer. During the second stage, four instructions were taken from the instruction buffer, decoded, and issued to instruction queues. Restrictions on instruction issue are few: of the two integer instruction queues, only one can accept one instruction, the other can accept up to four, as does the floating-point instruction queue.
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