Bill Henkel (noemail@yahoo.com) on 12/29/11 wrote:
---------------------------
>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.

A lot of software nowadays really has been parallellized. Focussing only at 2 cores and clock them 6Ghz really is not so interesting. 12 cores of 4Ghz on otherhand is :)

On one hand you want big performance a core and other hand a lot of those cores.

The laptop/notebook market really is different from desktop. Nowadays you buy a desktop for performance. For running your game faster, or crunching faster.

That desktopsoftware profits from high clocked cores more than low clocked cores, yet they do work in parallel, they do use load balancing techniques to distribute work over the different cores.

Bandwidth to the RAM plays important role in most games, whereas for applications like chess, just checkout lostcircuits what Diep's doing there.

So there is a big market for performance of CPU's, yet majority of cpu's sold i'd guess is no longer for desktops.

Those who do buy a desktop want performance. Just focussing upon 1 small issue is never a good idea if you want to mass produce.