>>>Regrettably, AMD could have been a contendah if their CPU core design had been
>>>a performer. (When will these companies learn that long pipe, high frequency hot
>>>rod designs are more hot than rod? AMD made a killing off the Pentium 4!) They
>>>were strategically the best placed among Intel / AMD / NVidia to capture the portable
>>>market. I don't think another opportunity like that is going to come for a while.
>>
>>What would AMD really bring to the table here? Lots of SoC companies (Samsung,
>>TI, Marvell) make very competitive designs just licensing cores (e.g. Cortex-A8/A9)
>>from ARM. Qualcomm does their own processor designs, but does it really give them a big leg up in the marketplace?
>>
>
>Nitpick: leading Cortex-A licensees are (Samsung, Apple, TI, Freescale). NVidia
>is likely #5 but very far behind. Soon we will see Altera in the list, that should surpass NVidia in no time.
>Marvell, like Qualcomm, uses cores of their own. In fact, Marvell target slightly
>different, and probably broader, market than the other 5.

Good catch, thanks.

>
>I don't know why you find pipeline stages trivia relevant. If we are going to believe
>to geekmarks, Bobcat is good deal faster than Cortex-A9 clock for clock, although memory subsystems are far from equal.

FYI -- I was referring to Ian Ollman's comment about P4-likeness with the pipeline depth.


>
>If Win8 (or any other non-apple) tablet market is going to flourish then AMD-designed
>ARM architecture SOC with fewer cores but higher single-thread performance than
>the rest of the market and with GPU featuring PC-compatible 3D API would certainly
>score some design wins. Especially if Cortex-A15 ends up as a flop.

From my perspective at least, at that point, I'd rather just have some low-power Ontario-based tablet -- x86 compatibility would be somewhat-beneficial to me. YMMV of course.