Brainiac CPU

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A brainiac CPU design is one which favors high instruction per clock (IPC) performance over high clock speed. Such designs generally have relatively short pipelines, excellent branch prediction and out-of-order execution design, and relatively low clock speeds for their level of real-world performance. Manufacturers of brainiac CPUs tend to focus on refining chip design to improve performance with minimal increase in clock speed, while manufacturers of speed demon CPUs tend to focus on refining the manufacturing process to increase clock speed with minimal changes in chip design.

Examples of x86 brainiac designs are Cyrix 6x86 and MII, AMD K6, K7, and K8 (including the Athlon 64), as well as Intel's P6 family and the Pentium M and Core.

It appears that, at least in the x86 family, the computer industry is again moving toward the brainiac design. While the Pentium 4 was originally forecast to run at up to 10 GHz, and in reality topped out at 3.8 GHz, both Intel's and AMD's current top performing CPUs are actually clocked around 3 GHz.