Applications paper

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Rachet Up Reliability for

Mission-Critical Applications

Intel

Instruction Replay Technology

The Intel® Itanium® processor family provides the foundation for mainframe-class com-

puting systems designed for today’s most demanding, mission-critical environments.

The latest Intel Itanium processor 9500

series (code-named Poulson) extends the

capabilities of the previous-generation Intel Itanium processor 9300 series to deliver

substantial improvements in mission-critical capability.

This white paper focuses on a particularly important new RAS feature in Intel Ita-

nium processor 9500 series: Intel Instruction Replay Technology. This new technology

provides enhanced support for automatically detecting and correcting errors in the

instruction pipeline of the processor. It not only identies a wider range of potential

errors, but also corrects them almost instantly, so the delay is transparent to the soft-

ware running on the server platform. Along with the many other RAS improvements

in this new processor family, Intel Instruction Replay Technology provides an even

stronger foundation for supporting the world’s most mission-critical computing require-

ments.

Steve Bostian

Intel Corporation

WHITE PAPER

Intel® Itanium® Processor 9500 Series

Mission Critical Computing

Summary of content (5 pages)

PAGE 1
WHITE PAPER Intel® Itanium® Processor 9500 Series Mission Critical Computing Rachet Up Reliability for Mission-Critical Applications Intel® Instruction Replay Technology Steve Bostian Intel Corporation The Intel® Itanium® processor family provides the foundation for mainframe-class computing systems designed for today’s most demanding, mission-critical environments.
PAGE 2
Improve Uptime for Your Most Critical Applications In addition to providing major performance gains, this new processor family delivers substantial improvements in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) to support even higher levels of data integrity and system uptime. Hardware-based error prevention, detection, and correction are enhanced and extended throughout the platform.
PAGE 3
Ratchet Up Reliability for Mission-Critical Applications processor family provides a major leap in performance for mission-critical workloads. It doubles the number of cores versus the Intel® Itanium® processor 9300 series (from four to eight) and implements a new 12-wide issue architecture to reture up to twice the instructions per cycle per core.
PAGE 4
Ratchet Up Reliability for Mission-Critical Applications Soft error detectors are located in several stages of the instruction execution pipeline to check parity, residues, and ECC. If a transient error occurs while the instruction is flowing down the pipeline, a simple replay of the affected instruction will correct the error. The instruction is simply reread correctly from the instruction buffer and restarted through the pipeline as if the error had never occurred.
PAGE 5
Ratchet Up Reliability for Mission-Critical Applications Resteer—correcting the rare errors that cannot be fixed in hardware There is another class of soft errors that are not directly correctable in hardware, but are detected and can be corrected by processor firmware. These errors are handled by a “resteer” operation. During a resteer, the OS or application is interrupted and processor firmware is executed to correct the error.