Sidney

If we would summarize the current trends in the CPU industry in three words, we think that those three words would be "TLP, caches and power consumption"[2]. TLP gets exploited more and more with the introduction of multi-threaded and multi-core CPUs. Caches get bigger and bigger as they don't increase power, but rather save power by preventing costly accesses to the memory controller. Power consumption determines which performance increasing techniques get the spotlight: wasteful techniques such as Dynamic Multi-Threading, double-pumped ALUs and extremely deep Out Of Order (OOO) windows that have fallen out of grace as they consume too much power.

It is pretty clear that these three trends - bigger caches, power consumption being a deciding factor in CPU design, and TLP - will continue to influence the CPU architectures heavily in the coming years. How would this be beneficial to an EPIC CPU?

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2598

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lazyman

Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II