[brigade]

You still need OoOe to execute your second example optimally since you didn't schedule the instructions, which points to why OoOe isn't going away - there are going to be code sequences that the compiler cannot schedule optimally, particularly around branches. Additionally, cache misses are impossible to predict statically, and OoOe helps hide those.

And no one does OoOe without register renaming.

[joosters]

Yeah, I avoided any other changes to avoid confusing the issue. But any reordering I could have done, the compiler could have done too. Your point about branches is fair though, as the 'active' renamed registers after a branch can only be known at runtime.

Still, I wonder whether some of the features of modern CPUs could be dropped if it wasn't for legacy code. On the other hand, Itanium tried to push the parallelism work onto the compiler and look where that ended up!