On Nov 14, 5:35, Eric Smith wrote:
> There's no challenge in naming a few parts that have speculative
> execution.
No, I suppose there isn't, assuming one knows what the term means at
all, because it's common in modern processors.
> However, I may have been a bit hasty. Although I don't think the
> R4600 was out at that time, after thinking about it some more it
> occurs to me that some earlier R4K series parts may have had
> speculative execution, and probably the DEC Alpha (20164).
I don't know much about the inner workings of Alphas, so I didn't
mention it. Nor do I know all that much about the inner workings of
R4K prior to the R4600, except that I know an R4600 will outstrip an
R4400 at the same clock speed (modulo cache differences) and an R4400
will outdo an R4000 by a fair bit. In fact, the earliest R4000 chips
were embarrassingly slow. I don't think R3000 or R4000 had speculative
execution, but I'm not absolutely sure.
> > I meant the Pentium family.
>
> Is there really a Pentium family? Aside from the Pentium Pro,
> Pentium II, and Pentium 3, which use similar cores, there seems to be
> little microarchitectural similarity between parts for which Intel
uses
> the "Pentium" name. For instance, there seems to be more similarity
> between the i486 and Pentium cores than between the Pentium III and
> Pentium IV cores, despite the fact that the Pentium was superscalar
> and the i486 was not.
I'm sure you're right. I've almost deliberately avoided knowing too
much about Intel chips post-8085, except to find out what MMX really
does, and discovering along the way that Intel do seem to have changed
their minds a few times.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Received on Fri Nov 14 2003 - 15:16:28 GMT