A brief, pulls-no-punches, fast paced introduction to the main design aspects of modern processor microarchitecture.

In particular, you might not be aware of some key topics that developed rapidly in recent times...

pipelining (superscalar, OOO, VLIW, branch prediction, predication)
multi-core and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT, hyper-threading)
SIMD vector instructions (MMX/SSE/AVX, AltiVec)
caches and the memory hierarchy
Fear not! This article will get you up to speed fast. In no time you'll be discussing the finer points of in-order vs out-of-order, hyper-threading, multi-core and cache organization like a pro.

But be prepared – this article is brief and to-the-point. It pulls no punches and the pace is pretty fierce (really). Let's get into it...