David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com) on May 21, 2013 1:54 pm wrote:
> > The thing is that Intel already knows how to do good, performant, power efficient cores.
> > There is two decades of experience there, you don't *need* to go back to Pentium core.
> >
> > They could have started with a pentium-m ish core, and probably had a much easier ability to take improved
> > structures from later cores and even share their own improvements back to the high performance line.
>
> I don't think that's true. The fundamental structures for memory and instruction reordering in the P6-derivatives
> and Silvermont are VERY different.]

No, I'm talking about the first Atom microarchitecture. If the requirement was a quick turnaround time with a small team, it would seem better to start with a Yonah core than to start with a P54 core.

> P6+ are all designed for multiple load/store per clock, which has a
> real impact on your design space. Silvermont is a very good design which has much smaller CAMing structures
> (e.g., LD/ST buffers). I don't think there's any real way to get from P6 to that point.

I think you could cut down CAM structures, if that helped perf/watt. Given that subsequent cores have moved to more execution pipelines and more load/store per clock, it wouldn't seem impossible to go the other way too, but sure it would be more difficult.