Ghz vs Raw processing power

[hgm]

The last thing you say is the key to the long life of the x86 instruction set. Because it is very compact, due to the small number of bits needed to indicate the small set of logical (architectural) registers, the extra transistors needes for the instruction decoding and register renaming is easily earned back from the reduction of the instruction cache size for a cache that can hold the same number of instructions. And most of the transistors of modern processor chips are in those caches.

Big caches aren't really that helpful for Chess, though. I think I could do a lot more with 64 Pentium-I CPUs on a chip with only a little L2 cache used for communication between them, than with a Core 2 Quad with 6MB L2.