Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 User Manual

IA-32 Intel® Architecture Optimization
xxiv
target the Intel NetBurst microarchitecture and the Pentium M processor
microarchitecture.
Tuning Your Application
Tuning an application for high performance on any IA-32 processor
requires understanding and basic skills in:
• IA-32 architecture
• C and Assembly language
• the hot-spot regions in your application that have significant impact
on software performance
• the optimization capabilities of your compiler
• techniques to evaluate the application’s performance
The Intel
®
VTune™ Performance Analyzer can help you analyze and
locate hot-spot regions in your applications. On the Pentium 4, Intel
®
Xeon
®
and Pentium M processors, this tool can monitor an application
through a selection of performance monitoring events and analyze the
performance event data that is gathered during code execution.
This manual also describes information that can be gathered using the
performance counters through Pentium 4 processor’s performance
monitoring events.
For VTune Performance Analyzer order information, see the web page:
h
ttp://developer.intel.com
About This Manual
In this document, the reference “Pentium 4 processor” refers to
processors based on the Intel NetBurst microarchitecture. Currently this
includes the Intel Pentium 4 processor and Intel Xeon processor. Where
appropriate, differences between Pentium 4 processor and Intel Xeon
processor are noted.

Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 Specifications

General

Instruction Set	x86
Instruction Set Type	CISC
Memory Segmentation	Supported
Operating Modes	Real mode, Protected mode, Virtual 8086 mode
Max Physical Address Size	36 bits (with PAE)
Max Virtual Address Size	32 bits
Architecture	IA-32 (Intel Architecture 32-bit)
Addressable Memory	4 GB (with Physical Address Extension up to 64 GB)
Floating Point Registers	8 x 80-bit
MMX Registers	8 x 64-bit
SSE Registers	8 x 128-bit
Registers	General-purpose registers (EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, ESI, EDI, ESP, EBP), Segment registers (CS, DS, SS, ES, FS, GS), Instruction pointer (EIP), Flags register (EFLAGS)
Floating Point Unit	Yes (x87)