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Not quite. When you have a front end that spits an instruction into micro-ops that's a fixed mapping of 1 to 1-3 instruction and your decoder can handle many of those every clock. When you a micro-coded instruction you can have that instruction turn into a whole subroutine of indefinite length and on most current designs you can only decode one at once and it takes over until it completes.



Man, TIL. Thank you. Had no idea about this architecture.




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