> The Pentium was not great, not terrible. IIRC 2 ways superscalar in-order, Eh, I don't agree. Look at the other superscalar microprocessors available around

> The Pentium was not great, not terrible. IIRC 2 ways superscalar in-order, Eh, I don't agree. Look at the other superscalar microprocessors available around the same time: * POWER (1990) * Alpha 21064 (1992) * PA-RISC 7100 (1992) * Pentium (1993) * POWER2 (1993) * MIPS R8000 (1994) * PA-RISC 7200 (1995) * UltraSparc (1995) * Alpha 21164 (1995) So, first of all, all of these are in-order processors. Out of order execution didn't come until later ('95 for PA-8000, '96 for R10k and Pentium Pro and '98 for Alpha 21264 and Power3). Second, all of the RISC superscalar processors prior to the Pentium are also (technically) dual issue. But Pentium did something unique: It can issue two integer instructions in the same cycle. Before that, all the others could issue only one instruction of a given type (load/store, int, and fp) per cycle. In other words, while they may be "dual issue", your instruction stream needs a mix of those types to get any benefit from multi-issue on those early implementations. In terms of having 2x execution units of the same type: POWER2 got there later in 1993, but was not a single-chip processor, followed by R8000 (also multi-chip), PA-7200 and 21164. That's why Pentium had pretty good integer benchmarks, even while it was getting crushed on floating point compared to RISC.