The trend lately has been wide, not tall. Lots of pipelines mean that a stall in any one isn't going to affect overall performance too much, even if those indiv

The trend lately has been wide, not tall. Lots of pipelines mean that a stall in any one isn't going to affect overall performance too much, even if those individual pipelines aren't quite as fast. The trend is going to be continuing into the future, too -- the E5 v4 Xeons, which are supposed to be released Any Week Now, are going to be topping out at 22 cores per processor.