I know a lot of people have been confused over Intel’s Core architecture, the chips that are powering Apple’s new machines. Some of you have merely been wondering what exactly makes these processors different from their Pentium predecessors; others of you have asked questions about how they differ from IBM’s PowerPC chips; still more have wondered where exactly Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank fit into it.
Well, rest easy. Ars Technica’s Jon “Hannibal” Stokes—who reputedly loves it when a plan comes together—has assembled one of his trademark investigations into the nitty-gritty details of processor architecture. His target this time? Intel’s Core architecture, the processors found in every new Intel Mac.
Now, there are two types of people. There are those who will hear a sentence like: “Specifically, it “multicore” [sic] doesn’t mean ‘throw out out-of-order execution and scale back single-threaded performance in favor of a massively parallel architecture that can run a torrent of simultaneous threads’” and think “fascinating,” and there’s the other 90% of the population, whose heads will be on their keyboards at “multicore.” For those of the latter persuasion, allow me to sum up: Core architecture good.
