IPC = OPC?

[Lonyo]

[l]http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_756_3734^3759,00.html[/l]

By Operations per cycle, does it mean instructions? And do these things the AMD procs have more of (OPC, FPU pipeline) make much difference, actual performance wise? It seems in many ways there isn't that much difference between XP and Intel speeds (especially given Intel OC ability)

 

[imgod2u]

I would guess by operations, they mean micro-ops. x86 instructions are decoded into micro-ops internally on the chip. 1 x86 instruction could be anywhere from 1 to 4 or more micro-ops. This is all theoretical. Other bottlenecks could come in, including data dependencies and decoding limitations. So the actual IPC varies significantly (depending on the code) from the theoretical maximum operations per clock.