wbmw, Fundamentally, it's the better 64-bit architecture, by far and away. Why?
AFAIK in the average, each of those 128-bit instructions is well populated with nop's. Moreover, I suspect that the good compiler should know very well how many clocks each operation takes, to produce optimal IPF code. I think it's not a good idea to imply this sort of things at the compile stage.
The only reson d'etre of this IPF instruction set was to get the extreme performance. So far I see that design requires 6 Mb of cache to show the top score and Intel is still shy about the Deerfield score. Given equal speed, IPF is much worse than x86. It must be much faster to be at least a little bit better.
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