> These design decisions all made sense when clock rates were exponentiating, but they're all nightmares now that we rely on branch prediction and memory prefet

> These design decisions all made sense when clock rates were exponentiating, but they're all nightmares now that we rely on branch prediction and memory prefetching and superscalar execution units. The codec is simply not a good fit for the computing architectures we have today. Arguably not a good choice for the year 2000, either, considering that all high performance CPUs at that time were out-of-order, superscalar and deeply pipelined.