However, this is emphatically not true, for the reasons described in the following sections.
Sub-ISA Parallelism and Micro-Operations
Like most recent high-performance x64 processors, the cores do not execute the x64 instruction set natively; instead, internally instructions are decoded into micro-operations, which the processor executes. This translation provides opportunities to parallelize beyond traditional superscalar execution.
Durango CPU cores have dual x64 instruction decoders, so they can decode two instructions per cycle. On average, an x86 instruction is converted to 1.7 micro-operations, and many common x64 instructions are converted to 1 micro-operation. In the right conditions, the processor can simultaneously issue six micro-operations: a load, a store, two ALU, and two vector floating point. The core has corresponding pipelines: two identical 64-bit ALU pipelines, two 128-bit vector float pipelines (one with float multiply, one with float add), one load pipeline, and one store pipeline. A core can retire 2 micro-operations a cycle.