Article: AMD's Mobile Strategy
By: Jason Chan (jchan.delete@this.gmail.com), January 10, 2012 6:06 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Bill Henkel on 12/29/11 wrote:
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> 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).
The power consumption of a 6 GHz dual-core x86 processor would not need to be higher than Sandy Bridge-EP so water cooling would not be necessary. Suppose each core on the dual-core chip had twice as much capacitance as a Sandy Bridge-EP core due to bigger clock buffers and more transistors. If that 2x capacitance was toggled at twice the frequency of Sandy Bridge-EP, each of these fast cores would use 4x as much power as a Sandy Bridge-EP core. Since there would be only 2 cores on the chip instead of 8, this dual-core chip could have the same power consumption as Sandy Bridge-EP.
AMD should design a dual-core x86 with 2 threads per core that is optimized for the maximum possible single thread performance with about 150W power consumption. On a 32nm process, over 6 GHz should be possible. This chip would be a very compelling desktop and workstation processor. This chip would also be a good fit for software that is priced per core. Intel will not make this type of chip because Intel needs their processor core to work in all market segments. AMD can use ARM-designed cores in other market segments and add their own "un-core" (GPU, HyperTransport, PCIe).
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> 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).
The power consumption of a 6 GHz dual-core x86 processor would not need to be higher than Sandy Bridge-EP so water cooling would not be necessary. Suppose each core on the dual-core chip had twice as much capacitance as a Sandy Bridge-EP core due to bigger clock buffers and more transistors. If that 2x capacitance was toggled at twice the frequency of Sandy Bridge-EP, each of these fast cores would use 4x as much power as a Sandy Bridge-EP core. Since there would be only 2 cores on the chip instead of 8, this dual-core chip could have the same power consumption as Sandy Bridge-EP.
AMD should design a dual-core x86 with 2 threads per core that is optimized for the maximum possible single thread performance with about 150W power consumption. On a 32nm process, over 6 GHz should be possible. This chip would be a very compelling desktop and workstation processor. This chip would also be a good fit for software that is priced per core. Intel will not make this type of chip because Intel needs their processor core to work in all market segments. AMD can use ARM-designed cores in other market segments and add their own "un-core" (GPU, HyperTransport, PCIe).
