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I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.


Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time.

The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc.

(In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.


Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature.

Just to be pedantic.


I thought that was all originally DEC Alpha IP.




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