[onan_barbarian]

Absolutely true.

Note that micro-fusion can allow you to push the number of uops retired per cycle to 5-6 (SNB would be 3 ALU, 2 loads, Haswell could be 4 ALU, 2 loads), as the issue/retire rates are on the fused domain.

It's a far cry from RISC - like a load/store machine.

All that being said micro-fusion only works with an ALU op and load from the same instruction and you obviously have to be careful to ensure that the load applies to the appropriate operand (tricky given the non-orthogonal, frequently 2-address form of the instructions).

[stephencanon]

You also need to have loads to do. Adding spurious loads just to boost uop retirement rate would be an interesting choice. :)