3 ms·

It’s also very wide and has a big reorder buffer so ‘just slapping 16 gigs’ of cache probably isn’t the answer.

• errantspark 5y ago
  Very wide in the sense of memory bandwidth particularly, or is there another kind of wideness at play here? "has a big reorder buffer", I'm interpreting this as "one of the notable advantages of the M1 is it's ability to be more clever about processing instructions out of order to maximize resource utilization". Is that about right?
  • klelatti 5y ago
    Width in the sense of how many instructions can be executed at the same time. If you’re really interested in this it might be worth finding a copy of the Patterson and Hennessy book. It’s a big read and expensive (but older versions are on the internet archive [1]) and covers all these design issues in quite a lot of detail. [1] https://archive.org/details/ComputerArchitectureAQuantitativeApproach4thEdition https://archive.org/details/ComputerArchitectureAQuantitativ...
    • errantspark 5y ago
      Gotcha, I wasn't really aware of instruction level parallelism previously. I think the pieces of the puzzle are a lot clearer to me now, thanks for the replies.