Wow, just reading Ars' little writeup on the supposed 30 stage pipline in the new Pentium. Wow. Some say it's to reduce heat consumption. I like the quote from the Intel representative in the article: "It will have a larger pipeline. The larger the pipleline, you can do less work per clock cycle and speed up the processor." It's like they're trying to inflate the penis size^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hclock speed of the processor. But as the writeup says, if they can keep the pipeline full.....<fonz>eyyy</fonz>!
My response? When / if I get a new CPU, rewrite the linux kernel to remove any branches. Then we'll see that pipeline in action!