Slashdot Mirror
Understanding Pipelining and Superscalar Execution
Zebulon Prime writes "Hannibal over at Ars has just posted a new article on processor technology. The article uses loads of analogies and diagrams to explain the basics behind pipelining and superscalar execution, and it's actually kind of funny (for a tech article). It's billed as a basic introduction to the concepts, but as a CS student and programmer I found it really helpful. I think this article is a sequel to a previous one that was linked here a while ago."
What if you just want to understand what your computer does "underneath the hood"? Slashdot has quite a few people reading it who feel this way; they tend to call themselves "geeks". While this might not be that useful to programmers in the course of their jobs, it might be useful to Slashdot's and Ars' audience: people who want to understand.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Performance per clock doesn't really matter, because lengthening the pipeline allows higher frequencies. I think a better metric is maximum performance in the same process, and the Pentium 4 wins there (unless you care about cost; then it gets tricky...).