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 brainiac CPUs include the AMD Athlon family, including the Athlon 64, as well as Intel's Pentium M and Intel Core CPU designs. It should be noted that on some benchmarks, certain brainiac Athlon 64 cores clocked at 2 GHz perform better than speed demon Pentium 4 CPUs clocked at over 3 GHz.
It appears that, at least in the x86 family, the computer industry is 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 under 3 GHz.
