Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
You are sticking to the same old number of decoders story.You really need to let it go. Bobcat has other OoO improvements that make it very efficient ,which is very important in average x86 code(which in turn has average IPC of just ~1).
It's not "old story" until proven otherwise. I did not see any prof why decoders are not important any more. Also any OoO improvement (if exists such) is not a replacement to decode stage.
Also keep in mind that average ILP depends on the actual application and this is only an average ILP, which mean that for some part of code it may be < 1 and for the other part it may be > 3 which mean that on cpu with fewer execution resources the average IPC will be lower (even if max IPC of the cpu > average ILP of the app). Also I can bet that apps which show very low IPC on "pentium" will be killers for bobcat. Low IPC usually means cpu is waiting data from memory while half speed cache of bobcat cant help too much here. BTW, Bonic benchmark keeps at min memory access.