i would guess that over 50% of the design investment in modern OOO CPUs is in branch prediction, cache tuning and so on … with multiple speed /cost points avail

i would guess that over 50% of the design investment in modern OOO CPUs is in branch prediction, cache tuning and so on … with multiple speed /cost points available to fine tune and balance prefetch, decode, instruction unit, blah blah to max out benchmark scores (the bible according to Hennessy et al). i would be more interested to see how fast you can make the literally 1000s of “snitch” cores go with the right software.