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If you're unclear why CPU development has moved from the single fast core model to dual, quad, and multi-core designs, here's a clear and concise explanation of the economic case underlying modern processor design.
Instruction scheduling is the biggest fundamental problem facing CPUs today. Even the best pipelined design issues only one instruction per clock, per pipeline (excluding things like macro-op fusion which combine multiple logical instructions into a single internal instruction). So we add more pipelines. But more pipelines can only get us so far - it becomes increasingly more difficult to figure out (schedule) which instructions can be executed on which pipeline at what time...
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