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Comment by rayiner

That's part of it, but doesn't fully answer the question. Decoding and issuing 6 instructions per cycle ordinarily is extremely costly in terms of power. And it's usually very hard to keep those execution units busy--it's hard to find six independent instructions to issue every clock cycle. How Apple built a 6-wide CPU within that power envelope, and optimized the compiler to actually use that IPC is the really interesting question.

On a Xeon v3 core, SPECint averages below 2 instructions per cycle: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322745869_A_Workloa.... How does Apple beat Intel on branch integer benchmarks like 403.gcc by a factor of two per clock?

parent rayiner 8 years ago

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