Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 26th Oct 2005 10:51 UTC
Actually, there's more on processors today, but the processor in this article is so out-of-the-ordinary, that it deserves its own item. "Niagara has eight processing engines - called cores - each able to simultaneously execute four instruction sequences called threads. It's neither the first multicore processor nor the first to employ multithreading, but it embraces both ideas more aggressively than competing chips from IBM, Intel and AMD."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Rayiner pointed out, " I said that x86 isn't the kind of boat-anchor its made out to be."
but only if you have 1 or maybe 2 behind a relatively large cache.
Instruction set architecture is fairly orthogonal to the memory system design, so I don't see what your point is.
If you're really talking about out-of-order vs in-order, well, in-order processors are significantly more sensitive to cache misses.
If one wanted alot more x86 cores, the boat anchor effect comes back in a hurry in several ways no matter how they are implemented.
Why? If x86 costs X% of die space in a one-core design it's still gonna cost X% of die space in an n-core design.