Intel unveils details on Goldmont microarchitecture that will power Apollo Lake

Intel spills more details on microarchitecture for low-power Intel Atoms

Intel has unveiled more information about its Goldmont microarchitecture that it is using in 14-nanometre Atom, Pentium and Celeron microprocessors.

It comes after the company updated its x86-64 programming guides, providing developers with more detailed information about Goldmont, which it originally launched at the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzen, China in April, and which the company has made clear will be used predominantly at the lower end as part of the Apollo Lake platform.

Goldmont will offer about 30 per cent better CPU performance and improved battery life. Architecturally, according to ExtremeTech, it has three decoder units (to its predecessor Silvermont's two) and a maximum of 20 bytes decoded per cycle.

"The fetch and instruction cache pipelines are no longer coupled, large page support have both been added, and there's a small L2 'precode' cache (16K) that didn't exist on prior Atom processors," according to ExtremeTech.

It continues: "Goldmont's triple-wide decoder is matched by its ability to retire up to three instructions per cycle, and the chip is capable of executing one load and store per clock cycle... Three simple integer operations can be executed per cycle and address generation is now out-of-order in Goldmont."

Goldmont will therefore generally offer improved instruction latencies, but will provide smaller performance gains over its predecessor, which isn't surprising given the length of time since Silvermont, which was only introduced in 2013.

The shift from 22-nanometre to 14-nanometre process manufacturing for Goldmont parts is also a smaller shift than from Bonnell (at 45-nanometre cores) to Silvermont (at 22 nanometres).

In addition to stuffing Goldmont into low-end computing devices, Intel is also hoping to propagate Goldmont-based CPUs in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) category.

Last month, Intel unveiled one of the first devices based on Goldmont, the Atom E3900, which the company billed as "edge to cloud network computing".

Unlike typical low-power consumption parts intended for connected devices, the Intel Atom also offers 3D graphics, improved by 2.9 times compared with the previous Atom generation, and can support three independent displays, according to Intel.