A 22 nm 15-Core Enterprise Xeon® Processor Family
Stefan Rusu, Harry Muljono, David Ayers, Simon M. Tam, Wei Chen, Aaron Martin, Shenggao Li, Sujal Vora, Raj Varada, Eddie Wang · IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits · 2014
This paper describes a 4.3B transistors, 15-cores, 30-threads enterprise Xeon® processor with a 37.5 MB shared L3 cache implemented in a 22 nm 9M Hi-K metal gate tri-gate process. A modular floorplan methodology enables easy chops to 10 and 6 cores. Multiple clock and voltage domains are used to reduce power consumption. The clock distribution uses a single PLL per column to save power and minimize deskew crossing points. Integrated PCIe Gen3 and Quick Path Interconnect® (QPI) ports operate at 8GT/s. The 4-channel memory interface supports both 1866 MT/s DDR3 and a new memory buffer interface running at 2667 MT/s on the same pins. The core, cache and I/O recovery techniques improve manufacturing yields and enable multiple product flavors from the same silicon die.