Since I feel like injecting more data.

P4:

note the integer dispatch limitation. [Answer 2]



Yohan:

note the integer dispatch limitation. [Answer 2]




Conroe: [Answer 3]

note the integer dispatch limitation.




Nehalem:

note the integer dispatch limitation. [Answer 3]



note that Barcelona has the EXACT SAME integer dispatch limitation. [Answer 3]



While I was gone, I wrote a couple basic micro-benchmarks:

1) A Integer compute limited micro-benchmark [Makes OoO and prediction useless; since it is impossible to mispredict and no hazards exist]
Which quickly found several interesting things:
a) performance was determined entirely by the following formula: time = 100,000 / (clock speed * number of integer instructions per clock executed)
b) When work shifted to more complex integer instruction mix [less adds and more XNORs] AMD began to have a drastic performance advantage
c) When work shifted to more complex floating point instruction mix [less adds and more shuffles] Intel began to have a drastic performance advantage

2) In a compute low, data rich program [b-trees and triple indirection vs arrays and zippers]
Several interesting things were found:
a) Performance was determined ENTIRELY by average latency in nano-seconds for data fetch [CPU clock speed, integer unit count, and etc didn't matter]
b) Caches showed improved performance until reaching 1 MB [Then showed rapidly dropping diminishing returns]
c) prediction seemed to be extremely closely tied to less than a half dozen assumptions [BOTH for AMD and Intel] Ironically both AMD and Intel, share only 3 of them. Any code outside of those assumptions had an average latency of main memory. [Extreme cache thrashing]

3) Finally in the real world; I took the following common applications and modified them to properly monitor them.
They generated the following average IPC under Ideal conditions:
a) Firefox [0.3 - 0.5 basic browsing; 2.7 when rendering video]
b) Open Office [0.01 - 0.7]
c) Apache [0.9 - 1.2]
d) XFREE86 [0.02 - 0.04]
e) GNOME [0.0001 - 0.0002]
f) KDE [0.0001 - 0.0002]


Now, I may be incorrect but what I have drawn from the preceding experiential evidence, is that with the exception of video rendering; The user will see absolutely no reduction in performance by AMD reducing the number of Integer Units.