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It's still pretty interesting though if you're into CPU architecture. It's an interesting little slice of history.
by zik 2y ago
It's still pretty interesting though if you're into CPU architecture. It's an interesting little slice of history.
- Dalewyn 2y agoThe P6 is the direct ancestor of the Intel Core line of CPUs, which is on its 14th and 15th generation on desktop and mobile respectively and presumably will see the 16th generation release later this year. (Screw the Intel Core(Ultra)<X> rebranding.) So in that sense, this is a very interesting bit of history that's still relevant today.
- phire 2y agoYeah, nearly 30 years of continual incremental improvements to the same P6 microarchitecture. Intel actually went back to the P6 µarch after Netburst (Pentium 4) failed to meet expectations. Fortunately, they had continue to improve P6 as a laptop focused processor (Pentium M). Netburst is a very interesting µarch, with a lot of interesting innovations. Some of those ideas (like hyperthreadding, the single physical register file and a simplified uop cache) eventually made their way back to the P6 uarch. And it's not just historically relevant to Intel. Other CPU vendors started copying the basic layout of the P6 and as now days the high-level views of AMD's Zen µarch and all high-performance AArch64 µarches look remarkably similar to the P6 and its decedents.