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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
dear somebody who understands cpu architectures: help me understand why pipelines have gotten so long.
i realise there are uses for out of order execution and speculative execution. although in recent times we're generally looking down on speculative execution...
honestly, i don't have much of a problem with branches so long as they're cheap, but they're not cheap on modern x86. this zen 2 seems to have a pipeline depth of about 22 cycles.
so i want to understand what it's doing with all these pipeline stages and how much these things contribute to performance
i also understand part of it is because intel decided to go with variable width instructions.