"Performance per watt"

Microprocessor ISA and Microarchitecture

— Will the future be more divergent?

There are architecture divisions between CISC and RISC; there are superscalar, VLIW, and dataflow microarchitectures. Moreover, there are enterprise, desktop/laptop, and embedded market segmentations. Therefore (?), the following is not well-organized.

• x86 Architecture

  — Things are changing, however, "object code created for processors released as early as 1978 still executes on the latest processors in the IA-32 architecture family."

  • Intel
    1. IA-32 Intel architecture (IA-32 Intel Architecture software developer's manuals)
    2. Extended Memory 64 technology
    3. Matrix Math Extension (MMX) ® technology and Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSEx)
    4. Hyper-Threading technology
    5. Multi-core and many-core technology
    6. Machine check architecture
    7. Virtualization technology
       1. VT-x architecture
       2. VT-i architecture (for the Intel Itanium architecture)
    8. Power-aware computing: Enhanced Speedstep technology
    9. Safer computing
       1. LaGrande technology
       2. XD (eXecute Disable), a .k.a. NX (No eXecute)
    10. Active Management technology
  • AMD
    1. Pacifica technology
    2. Hyper-Transport ™ technology ( HyperTransport Consortium)
  • Transmeta
  • VIA (Cyrix)
• RISC

  — Can the CISC versus RISC debate now be settled?

  • MIPS
  • IBM
    1. Power 5/6 (Power.org)
    2. Cell processors
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Compaq
  • HP
• VLIW
  • Intel Itanium
  • TI
  • Philips
• Embedded
  • ARM