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Re:BOOM Open Source RISC-V Core Runs on Amazon EC2 F1 Instances by TomVDB on Thursday December 13, 2018 @11:01AM (#18673272)
Less time spent waiting: yes.

Like reading from disk: no.

The max amount of out-of-order instructions is typically around 300 these days?

Reading from disk takes millions of cycles.

It’s about avoid waits when reading from L1 and L2 cache and DRAM.

Re:BOOM Open Source RISC-V Core Runs on Amazon EC2 F1 Instances by zozbot123 on Thursday December 13, 2018 @11:52AM (#18673767)
Yup, reading from disk will trigger a context switch from the OS, whether it happens explicitly or via a page fault involving virtual memory. (The closest parallel to that at the hardware level would be SMT.) As an aside, another rationale - perhaps a more paradigmatic one - for OOO involves achieving full use of super-scalar execution units on a processor core, when instructions have complex dependencies on one another.