Speed-demons

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A speed demon CPU design is one which favors high clock speed over high instructions per clock (IPC). Typical features of a speed demon CPU include very long pipelines, and more efforts to refine the manufacturing process than would be necessary for a brainiac design. While manufacturers of brainiac CPUs tend to refine the chip design to achieve higher performance without much increase in clock speed, manufacturers of speed demon CPUs tend to refine the manufacturing process to achieve a higher clock speed without significant change in chip design.

Examples of speed demon CPUs include the Pentium 4, especially the Prescott, which was designed with a 31-stage pipeline, compared to 20 stages for the Northwood, 12 stages for the Athlon 64, and 10 stages for the Athlon XP. Another example is the cell processor, which is the CPU in Sony's Playstation 3.[1]

It appears that, at least in the popular x86 family, the CPU industry is moving away from the speed demon 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.

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