Where can I obtain all specifications of a given Intel processor?

Question

Where can I obtain the manuals and complete specifications of a given Intel processor? Specifically, I need all information I can get about the Xeon E5645 processor: I need latencies, cache toplogy, etc. I couldn't find complete documentation at the Intel website. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You should start at http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/ - Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manuals. The manual is the first source of Intel's x86 and x86_64 CPUs details. A lot is described in them, there are 40+ revisions of some volumes. You should download all manuals from "3 volume set" or "5 volume set". Also you should download "Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual".

Unfortunately, not all information is documented in such manuals. Lot of information is not published, but some of it can be get from experiments. The best source of actual low-level information is Agner's manuals: http://www.agner.org/optimize/. He did thousands of experiments to measure how will CPU work in various cases. The Agner's manual is updated several times each year. It is the source of information for GCC developers (instruction scheduling rules in machine description files are based on Agner's, not on Intel's).

Answer 2

I would start here: http://www.intel.com/products/server/processor/xeon5000/index.htm

What you want is most likely in the Technical Documents section.

Answer 3

Latencies can be measured just like it was done here http://www.friweb.hu/instlatx64/

These lists were created by AIDA64 Instruction Latency dump feature. If you do not believe in software measurements, wait for the official Intel/AMD/etc. guide and hope it will be more detailed and accurate than the current one. ;) You can create such dump in AIDA64 by right-clicking on the bottom status bar of AIDA64 main window -> CPU Debug -> Instruction Latency Dump. It fully works on trial version, too.