info about intel Pentium architecture

[syedahmar]

where can i get all the logic level architecture info. about intel processor??? I need it for my FPGA based project hwre i intend to burn my own mini processor instead of intel and insert in a motherboard...I need help. How to go about my project??? What do i need to learn? And what will be the key issues i would need to keep in my mind.??
Help....

 

[nand_gates]

About pentium architecture its difficult to get docs! But you can get some docs
(a book ) about AMD's K6 processor which is simmilar to Pentium!!
See the book below...

The Anatomy of a High-Performance Microprocessor: A Systems Perspective
Bruce Shriver, Bennett Smith
ISBN: 0-8186-8400-3
Hardcover
546 pages
June 1998, Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press
Wiley List Price: US $72.50

This one is excellent book on the subject!

 

[yego]

If you want to implement some kind of processor in your FPGA, and it is not going to be the Pentium counterpart, you better drop the Pentium trail, as the processor is very complicated with its buffers, caches, jump prediction blocks, victim buffers, multiple pipelines, ..... , and so on, and so on. Take something easier to understand if you are not a specialist in this field. I think that ARM is a very neat core but it sure may be complicated for a non skilled designer.

You may start with something as simple as the PicoBlaze or the MicroBlaze.
Those designs are well documented on the Xilinx site and there are VHDL sources for PB available as well. Also there are lots of good designs on the opencores site. You may pick any of them and learn.
You may disagree, but internally Pentium processor is quite a typical RISC design, though externally it is considered to be a CISC proc. So if you learn any typical RISC architecture with some kind of a pipeline you may think of trying to mock the Pentium instruction set, but forget about the performance even comparable to Pentium. Pentium is a (very) custom ASIC design, so porting it to any FPGA will cost you an arm and a leg and the result will be rather disappointing.

Regards, yego

 

[echo47]

The Pentium is optimized to execute one instruction sequence at very high clock rate. Such an architecture would perform extremely poorly in an FPGA. The FPGA is much better suited for executing many parallel operations at a slower clock rate. If you do that properly, the FPGA can blow away the Pentium. These are two very different animals.