Intel® XScale® Micro-Architecture

Definition:The Intel XScale micro-architecture is an implementation of the ARM V5TE architecture.

The XScale core supports both dynamic frequency and voltage scaling with a maximum frequency today in handheld devices of 624MHz (and increasing going forward). The design is a scalar, in-order single issue architecture with concurrent execution in 3 pipes that support out-of-order return. To support the frequency targets, a 7-stage integer pipeline is employed with dynamic branch prediction supplied to mitigate the cost of a deeper pipeline (see Figure 1).

In favour of memory access efficiency, the Intel XScale micro-architecture contains instruction and data caches (32KB each). Also, in order to hide memory latency the micro-architecture supports software issued prefetch capability coupled with advanced load and store buffering. Load buffering allows multiple data/cache lines request from the memory concurrently, thus reducing the data loading overhead. Similarly, store buffers combine...