Physical Implementation of the Eight-Core Godson-3B Microprocessor

Abstract

The Godson-3B processor is a powerful processor designed for high performance servers including Dawning Servers. It offers significantly improved performance over previous Godson-3 series CPUs by incorporating eight CPU cores and vector computing units. It contains 582.6 M transistors within 300 mm 2 area in 65 nm technology and is implemented in parallel with full hierarchical design flows. In Godson-3B, advanced clock distribution mechanisms including GALS (Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous) and clock mesh are adopted to obtain an OCV tolerable clock network. Custom-designed de-skew modules are also implemented to afford further latency balance after fabrication. The power reduction of Godson-3B is maintained by MLMM (Multi Level Multi Mode) clock gating and multi-threshold-voltage cells substitution schemes. The highest frequency of Godson-3B is 1.05 GHz and the peak performance is 128 GFlops (double-precision) or 256 GFlops (single-precision) with 40 W power consumption.