"K7" Technica

Ars Technica serving up the technology again with their excellent technical preview of the "K7". Here's part 1, and the hot off the presses part 2.

Last time we talked about the execution engine of the K7, and how it's got enough horsepower to do more work per clock cycle than any other x86 processor on the market. But as I hinted at in the end of Part I, all of those execution units do you no good, however, if you can't feed instructions to them fast enough to keep them fully occupied. That's where the front end of the CPU comes in. The front end is like a backstage area for instructions, where they get all primped up and ready to go out to the execution engine and do their thing. There's even a fussy guy with a French accent who has a space cadet haircut and really good shoes, running around saying things like "Places people! Places!" and "You know what to do!" Ok, not really, but it's close. Let me explain.