[Gllug] IA32? IA64? x86...

[Christian Smith]

On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Tethys wrote:

>
>>Then Pentium Pro was the 686 evolution, mainly a die shrink, newer
>>pipeline, faster floating point, but they priced it well out of reach
>>for most people.
>
>PPro was never aimed at the mass market. Yes, it had some minor
>pipelining changes over the Pentium, but the real difference was the
>increased on chip cache, which was responsible for a large amount of
>the extortionate price. 

Actually, I picked up a PPro200 for £200 at a trade fair early-96, very 
reasonable at the time. What was extortionate was the M/Board and ATX 
case!

To be fair, PPro was a complete redesign, and had little (nothing in fact) 
in common with Pentium. PPro was something like a man-millenium of work, 
which is a fair whack of man power!

PPro was the first Intel processor to use a translating execution engine, 
where the ia32 instructions were compiled into 'risc like' (microcode like 
more like) instructions for the pipeline. A bit like JIT compiling.

These instructions were then put into a queue to be executed by the long
pipeline for high MHz execution. The benefit being that decoding was done
asynchronously from execution, and thus not affected by pipeline stalls
etc. This scheme was first used by the NexGen Nx586, whose Nx686 later
became the AMD K6.

The FP copro in the PPro was also MUCH better than the Pentium FP, and 
briefly held the SPECFp benchmark record from even Alpha!

All in all, the PPro was simply a superb processor, a design which lasted
5-6 years, and scaled almost 10 times in clock speed. Kudos to Intel on
that (that was hard to say:).

>
>Tet
>

Christian

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