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Right; it's easy to forget that superscalar CPU cores don't actually have to be in-order, but most of them are out-of-order because that's usually necessary to make good use of a wide superscalar core.

(What's the best-performing in-order general purpose CPU core? POWER6 was notably in-order and ran at quite high clock speeds for the time. Intel's first-gen Atom cores were in-order and around the same time as POWER6 but at half the clock speed. SPARC T3 was ran at an even lower clock speed.)



POWER6 might indeed have been the last In-Order speed demon.


The IBM Z10 came out a year later. It was co-designed with POWER6 as part of IBM's eClipz project, and shared a number of features / design choices, including in-order execution.




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