Article: AMD's Mobile Strategy
By: gallier2 (gallier2.delete@this.gmx.de), December 20, 2011 1:31 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Bill Henkel (noemail@yahoo.com) on 12/19/11 wrote:
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>Tom P (tp5@gmail.com) on 12/19/11 wrote:
>>Are you sure it is possible to make a 6 GHz dual core chip?
>
>If it is possible to make a 3.1 GHz 8-core 150W 32nm chip (SandyBridge-EP), it
>surely must be possible to make a 6 GHz 2-core 200-300W 28nm chip. Doubling the
>number of pipe stages would be the simple way to do it but since you would have
>4x the transistors per core, it wouldn't be necessary to do that. AMD could make
>a lot more profit selling $1K processors to gamers instead of $100 mainstream processors
>even though the market for $1K processors is 1/10th as big.
How many $1K chips does Intel sell in comparison to <$200 chips? Yeah, not much. Why would it be better for AMD to try to sell to that dwindling demographic (gamers with more cash than brain)? Don't forget, the good enough is the worst brake in CPU developement. To give an example, I have an AMD Phenom II 720 in my PC and I don't need a (CPU) upgrade anytime soon. More disk, maybe SSD, a second screen, but CPU power, certainly not. For the few CPU intensive tasks I happen to do (video transcoding), it makes no difference if it takes 30min or 4 hours.
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>Tom P (tp5@gmail.com) on 12/19/11 wrote:
>>Are you sure it is possible to make a 6 GHz dual core chip?
>
>If it is possible to make a 3.1 GHz 8-core 150W 32nm chip (SandyBridge-EP), it
>surely must be possible to make a 6 GHz 2-core 200-300W 28nm chip. Doubling the
>number of pipe stages would be the simple way to do it but since you would have
>4x the transistors per core, it wouldn't be necessary to do that. AMD could make
>a lot more profit selling $1K processors to gamers instead of $100 mainstream processors
>even though the market for $1K processors is 1/10th as big.
How many $1K chips does Intel sell in comparison to <$200 chips? Yeah, not much. Why would it be better for AMD to try to sell to that dwindling demographic (gamers with more cash than brain)? Don't forget, the good enough is the worst brake in CPU developement. To give an example, I have an AMD Phenom II 720 in my PC and I don't need a (CPU) upgrade anytime soon. More disk, maybe SSD, a second screen, but CPU power, certainly not. For the few CPU intensive tasks I happen to do (video transcoding), it makes no difference if it takes 30min or 4 hours.
