Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

If Astro’s performance turns out to be 50% better than Crusoe’s on a constant-clock basis,
Astro will likely have a bright future in the marketplace. Outside of some tech geeks, few will
especially care how the improvement was achieved. .

The point is that aside from increasing issue width, the other avenues to increasing
architectural performance are even more difficult, complex, power hungry, and tend to
have deleterious effects on clock rate (the brainiac curse) of the same order or greater
than the gain in IPC. That is why I strongly doubt the 50% figure is close to being realistic
But if that was the design *goal* then it would be easy to see a tremendous increase in
complexity, die size, and clock normalized power consumption compared to Crusoe
even for a moderate increase in architectural performance. Pick your poison Dew.