Quote:Core 2 duo came out of it so that's a win, right?
The core 2 architecture (called core internally by intel just to add further confusion) slowly evolved from P6.
p6 (pentium pro) -> p6 (pentium II) -> p6 (pentium III) -> p6 (pentium mobile) -> core -> core 2
Each generation shows an increase in both IPC and performance per watt on the same manufacturing technology compared to its predecessor.
Quote:Obvious reasons?
What, it was slow and ineffiecient?
.....kind of
I'm pretty tired and haven't gotten a lot of sleep over the past couple of days on account of being busy. I was planning on quickly browsing the forums tonight so I won't leave you with my normal bull blown wall-of-text explaining everything in elaborate detail.
Quick summary: The netburst microarchitecture (the microarchitecture used in pentium IV, pentium D, etc. cpus from that era) was designed for exploiting superpipelining as much as possible. The general idea was to produce an extremely long pipeline capable of achieving high clock rates within reasonable voltage limitations while trying to minimize the IPC impact of the long pipeline through improvements in branch prediction, micro-op trace cache, MLP (memory level parallelism), and out-of-order superscalar execution. Of course higher voltages/clock rates also produce higher power consumption and higher power leakage which produces a much higher TDP. The longer pipelines further compounded the problem by making the power leakage even higher. A large die size contributed to high cost.
The architecture produced higher clock rates at the expense of lower IPC and energy efficiency. Overall performance was still higher than its predecessor though......until......the inevitable happened. We hit the heat wall. We eventually reached the limits of how much TDP a desktop chip could have. And that stopped the clock rate from climbing any higher. Basically the architecture didn't scale well into the future and intel shifted its development focus back to P6 and created core/core 2.
Edit: I'm not writing any more tonight.
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"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
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-Ron Swanson
"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
-Mark Antony