I know it has been discussed before, but I never thought the pipeline would be longer than 25 or so steps. Now PCMag is reporting that it will be 31 steps long. That is insane.
"That's partly because the 31-stage pipeline in Prescott is longer than the 20-stage pipeline of Northwood, resulting in a performance hit with branchy code like that found in our Business Winstone 2004 test (though the larger caches help soften the blow). Moreover, the SSE3 instructions that Prescott supports are not yet exploited by most of the apps that make up our Content Creation Winstone 2004 test. But the Prescott architecture does set the stage for performance gains as Intel pushes toward 4 GHz and beyond. So Prescott is an important step."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1478310,00.asp
That processor will take one major preformance hit when it is released.
"That's partly because the 31-stage pipeline in Prescott is longer than the 20-stage pipeline of Northwood, resulting in a performance hit with branchy code like that found in our Business Winstone 2004 test (though the larger caches help soften the blow). Moreover, the SSE3 instructions that Prescott supports are not yet exploited by most of the apps that make up our Content Creation Winstone 2004 test. But the Prescott architecture does set the stage for performance gains as Intel pushes toward 4 GHz and beyond. So Prescott is an important step."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1478310,00.asp
That processor will take one major preformance hit when it is released.