Earlier this year at its Developer Forum, Intel unveiled Core, the next-generation processor architecture that will power everything from Apple portables to Windows servers. Hannibal takes an in-depth look at what makes Core tick, and he explains how the most powerful x86 processor to date works its magic.

In a time when an increasing number of processors are moving away from out-of-order execution (OOOE, or sometimes just OOO) toward in-order, more VLIW-like designs that rely heavily on multithreading and compiler/coder smarts for their performance, Core is as full-throated an affirmation of the ongoing importance of OOOE as you can get. Core represents the current apex of OOOE design, where as much code and data stream optimization as possible is carried out in silicon. Core is bigger, wider, and more massively resourced in terms of both execution units and scheduling hardware than just about any mass-market design that has come before it. "More of everything" seems to have been the motto of Core's design team, because in every phase of Core's pipeline there's more of just about anything you could think of: more decoding logic, more reorder buffer space, more reservation station entries, more issue ports, more execution hardware, more memory buffer space, and so on. In short, Core's designers took everything that has already been proven to work and added more of it, along with a few new tricks and tweaks that extend some tried-and-true ideas into different areas.

Intel has bet the farm that single-threaded performance will be of the utmost importance for the next five or so years. Is Core the horse that will put Intel back into the x86 performance lead and keep them there? Read on to find out.