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Intel Core 2 'Penryn' and Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Linux Hardware has posted a look at the new Intel "Penryn" processor and how the new processor will work with Linux. Intel recently released the new "Penryn" Core 2 processor with many new features. So what are these features and how will they equate into benefits to Linux users? The article covers all the high points of the new "Penryn" core and talks to a couple Linux projects about end-user performance of the chip."
instead of trying to cram extra instructions
Cram? Chip designers get more and more transistors to use every year. I don't believe there's any "cramming" involved.
into an already bloated CISC CPU?
You're about 15 years out of date. The x86 isn't exactly a CISC CPU, it's a complex instruction set that decodes into a simpler one internally. Only the intel engineers know how they added the SSE4 instructions, but based on the comments of the encode/decode guys, these new instructions sound a lot like the old instructions. It's not too hard to imagine that they didn't have to change much silicon around, and maybe got to re-use some old internal stuff and just interpret the new instructions differently.
Anyway, so why not just have a dedicated piece of silicon for this exact purpose? Partly because it'd be more expensive (you'd have to basically implement a lot of the stuff already on CPU like cache, etc), but also because it's just too specific. How many people really care about encoding video? 5% of the market? Less?
Hardware decoding on hardware is already a reality, and has been for some time. GPUs have implemented this feature for at least 10 years. But of course it's generally not a feature that has dedicated silicon, it's integrated into the GPU. If this is the first you've heard of it, it's not surprising. The other problem with non-CPU specific accelerations is they don't ever really become standard, as there's no standard instruction set for GPUs, and ever a GPU maker may just drop that feature in the next line of cards.
In short, specialized means specialized. Specialized things don't tend to survive very well.
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