Megawhosis and Gigawhatsis?! Microprocessors Demystified, Transistors Explained and the Increased Importance of Well-written Software Discussed

摘要

1.Many folks in the industry understand storage hierarchies while comparatively few understand the microprocessor beyond a "black box" or 2. Many folks rigidly equate higher frequency with higher performance It's entirely possible that a lower frequency design may outperform a higher frequency design 3.With Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling drawing to a close, dramatic frequency boosts from generation to generation are over, and modern processors deliver continued generational performance through more efficient, wider and clever designs 4.Now more than ever, peak value from state of the art hardware can only be attained when it operates upon state of the art software As designs evolve, sometimes tradeoffs are made to jettison logic that enables satisfactory performance around poor programming practices in order to improve performance in the general case Ergo, it's possible that the same (suboptimal) code will perform worse on a newer generation of processor.