Using those transistors ...

  • Wider datapaths and circuit elements (from 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 bits)
  • Caches
  • Additional functionality on the die (MMU, floating point, L2 cache controller)
  • Deeper pipelining (multiple instructions in progress at a time)
  • Superscalar architectures (instruction-level parallelism -- multiple instruction streams)

    [Some Intel examples]

    The result: increased performance, decreased cost
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