[auvrw]

this is a pretty naive comment, but it's really intended to be totally serious: what's up with cores? like, why do we really need cores? is it really fundametally better architecture to have a RISC sitting at the front of the instruction pipeline to distribute x86 instructions to some internal set (particularly wrt. to power consumption), or do we in fact just have cores in order to increase fab yield [/ootbcomp.com-bootcamping]

[wmf]

Are you proposing a 32-issue processor instead of eight 4-issue cores? One problem with that is that most software doesn't have enough instruction-level parallelism to use such resources. Such a complex processor would also be likely to become bottlenecked on central control structures like the issue window (which can be solved with clustering, but then you're almost back to multicore). But check out EDGE/TRIPS/E2 for some ideas in this area.

[auvrw]

I'm talking about something I don't understand....