Pentium 4 tech at Ace's
The good, wholesome chaps over at Ace's Hardware have updated their long-running series on High Performance CPUs to include some insight into the P4's architecture.
This time we look at the design decisions and tradeoffs made by the Pentium 4 team. Are high clock-rates the road to higher performance, or will IPC still play an important role in the future of x86 processors? There have been plenty of questions about the Pentium 4's performance and how it relates to current Athlon and Pentium III processors. We look at x86 instruction mixes for current software, branches and prediction rates, instruction level parallelism, and more.
The article takes a look back at some of the design implementation of CPUs like the Athlon in order to see potential lessons learned and influences on Intel's P4. As usual with these guy's stuff, it'll make ya think.
