I'd really like to get hold of a model for a modern CPU and properly analyse what all the performance features actually get us in terms of performance. - Branc

I'd really like to get hold of a model for a modern CPU and properly analyse what all the performance features actually get us in terms of performance. - Branch prediction and speculative execution - Out of order execution - Massive physical register files and register renaming - Cache predictors - and many more I'm sure. Speculative execution is the big one for me, just because of the information leakage possible through it. It's there because you'd have to pause fetching new instructions until the result of a conditional branch is known, which has knock-on effects to instruction scheduling... But how big are these effects? Do some certain combinations of features supercharge or work against each other? I'm sure there's people looking at such things inside Intel and AMD, but it doesn't seem like there's much out there for public consumption.