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When you think about it, it makes sense for a CPU in a game console to not include things like out-of-order. 100% of the software it's running are program compiles for that exact machine. Therefore you can just tell developers to use a particular set of compiler flags and get acceptable instruction scheduling.

Contrast this with the software a PC runs -- mostly compiled to be optimized for a "generic" x86 CPU. In fact, it may have been compiled many years before the CPU was even designed. There is a lot more scope for runtime re-ordering to improve execution unit utilization.

If the whole world ran Gentoo, commodity CPUs probably would be in-order too.



Well, if you look at modern IBM System/360 descendants (z/arch, etc), this is almost what they do. Programs are compiled to an IL bytecode, and then recompiled during install to produce a CPU-specific binary. Its largely the same concept.




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