POWER4 performance enhancements

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The POWER4 microprocessor includes the several performance enhancements.

  • It is optimized for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), thus providing better instruction parallelism.
  • It employs better scheduling for instructions and data prefetching and a more effective branch-prediction mechanism.
  • It provides higher memory bandwidth than the POWER3 microprocessor, and is designed to operate at much higher frequencies.