NJ5 on 18 November 2008
@goddog: Can you find me a single page with a definition of "die shrinking" which allows for the functionality of the circuit to change? I don't think you can, because that's called updating/redesigning/improving the circuit. "Prediction paths being less likely to err" does not happen just by making the transistors smaller, after all the transistors have the same logic no matter how small or big they are. A change like that would be a new revision of the CPU, like Intel often does within the same family (sometimes almost silently).
That document you pasted doesn't contradict what I said btw. It says the chip was "updated" which could well explain the difference in branch prediction.
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