gallier2 on 12/20/11 wrote:
> good enough is the worst brake in CPU developement

There are always people with bigger problems or less patience, even though this isn't true in your particular case. I think the real problem for both AMD and Intel is that their new processors don't make most existing software run any faster. Also, for the first time ever, the latest version of Windows doesn't use more resources than its predecessor.

Doug Siebert on 12/20/11 wrote:
> Basically your option is a total gamble,
> and unless everything went exactly
> according to plan, and Intel was not able
> to use their process generation and cash
> advantage to take back the performance
> lead, AMD would be bankrupt before they
> could get another design out the door.

Is making low-profit bargain bin chips a better strategy? AMD's products need differentiation from Intel's products that some group of customers will pay extra for. For mobile processors, a differentiator could be a high-quality low-power H.264 encoder. For desktops and workstations, a differentiator could be higher single thread performance rather than more cores per socket (e.g. a 6 GHz dual-core water-cooled processor). Another differentiator could be larger caches (e.g. 256 MBytes of L4 cache on the processor socket). Another differentiator could be enabling 3rd-party innovation by making the cache-coherency protocol on the HyperTransport bus publically available and royalty-free.

Intel is adding more cores per socket so I think AMD should focus on single thread performance. If Intel was focused on single thread performance, then AMD should focus on more threads per socket. This is more profitable than trying to make a cheaper version of whatever Intel makes, especially when AMD's version just has a lower price, not a lower cost.