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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

487 points · 206 comments · ibobev

  1. hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
    With CPUs becoming wider and wider, it's almost like they run VLIW instructions, only more flexible.
    1. mort96 · · focus · HN ↗
      Huh no, wide vector units or lots of execution units per core is nothing like wide instruction words? Superscalar out-of-order execution is specifically a way to get instruction level parallelism without the wide instruction words
      1. chiph · · focus · HN ↗
        I was thinking that for this new generation, "Superscalar" doesn't cover it anymore, except as a generic term for the design technique. "Ultrascalar"? "Superscalar Pro"?
        1. mort96 · · focus · HN ↗
          I mean superscalar just is a different name for using wide cores and runtime dependency tracking and out-of-order execution for instruction level parallelism without VLIW.

          To my eyes, your message looks kinda like, "The term 'bicycle' doesn't cover it anymore, things have changed so much since they were introduced. We should call them something else, maybe 'bicycle pro'? 'super bicycle'?" No it's just a bike, and no, modern CPUs are just CPUs which look scalar at the ISA level but have ILP

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