Intel..............hard at work.............thier newest arsenal revealed........

[oblivion]

LOOK (http://www.firingsquad.com/features/idf/default.asp)

[Paul V]

Hmm, I wonder how much performance increase we will see on these new processors. They are doubling the pipeline depth, which means they can clock things faster, but also means more clock cycles will be needed to do complex instructions, and there will be more time wasted when a predicted branch fails to occur.

I think speeds may be very deceptive soon. These new processors will run at higher speeds, which is good in selling computers, but will do less per cycle. Thus they're not getting much faster. In fact one of the new CPUs at will run slower than your pentium Pro/2/3 would at the same speed, because it does less per cycle. So you get more MHz but less bang per MHz, basically.

Ultimately, we're not going to see drastic increases anymore in performance in the near future, as we seem to be running things to the point where the physical limitations of the semiconductors are holding things up.

It seems that they're doing the same thing my mom used to do when we were very little kids, and after being handed a piece of cake wanted more cake. She'd simply cut the piece we were given in half, and tell us "now you're getting two pieces of cake".

And there is a performance boost to increasing the pipeline, because you can have more commands simultaneously being done, and can start a new one faster, however it also as I said means you have to redo more commands on every branch that's missed. It will be very interesting to see the performance of these CPUs.

[This message has been edited by Paul V (edited 02-21-2000).]

[tkray]

I wonder if someday dual processors will become a standard, where the second one simply backs up the first one as far as missed branches and the like, or true in-sync processing?
I've always wondered why the market hasn't steered the consumer in this direction. After all, they'd make twice as much money.