anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on June 30, 2013 10:41 am wrote:
> This is your only justification for your assertion that multiple producers in some
> highly competitive markets are spending effort on useless product changes?

If you ignore half of my post...

> How easy do you think it is to double floating point performance?

Depends, what's the starting point? Doubling SIMD width or pipelining the FPU is pretty easy, if your FPU is small compared to the rest of the core, it is also cheap.

> You can't on one
> hand say "that costs a lot" to an alternative that does not fit your narrative, and
> on the other hand say "doubling floating point performance is easy and cheap".

I didn't say that, anyway.

> If it was so easy and cheap, and so important for useless benchmarks, then why would
> not Intel have added huge floating point performance to Silvermont? Answer that.

Ask Intel, Silvermont is a rather small core, a FPU that is small on Haswell may be quite big on Silvermont.

> It costs depending on how much you put on, and how you measure the costs exactly.

Since a small L4 is useless even for syntethic benchmarks, I think everybody understood you were sugesting a big L4.

> Implementing floating point performance that you find in A15, for example, is not "free or very cheap".

Well, do you have a die shot?

> No it doesn't. GPU can do more flops/watt than a CPU, and more flops/area. Just put a
> little A7 core in one corner to run the OS, and dedicate the rest to a GPGPU array.

And then your core will costs a lot more than a simple A7 and still have the same horrible integer performance, that's exactly what Linus were arguing against.