Actually, my theory is that the branch predictors are the only Netburst features to be ported over into the Core microcarchitecture.Originally Posted by Hornet331
P4 area had to pay of in some way.
i bet without the P4 we wouldn't have that aggressive prefetchers.
Netburst, at the end of life, had some 31 stages in it's pipeline... without question the largest performance hit were in mispredicted branches, where some 30 cycles would be wasted just flushing the pipeline and repopulating it.
To get as much as they could, the designer likely really worked over the branch predictors to avoid this penalty. Unfortunately, I cannot post the data, it is not mine, but RealWorldTech asked me for some inputs on an article they are working on specifically asking 'why is Core so much better at gaming than K10'... so I know the answer already as I have seen the data.
Jack
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