> I think Zen will be expensive because (i) there are many more transistors than
> Excavator, (ii) the FinFET node is not cheap, and (iii) AMD needs the money.
>
> I think AMD will be behind in efficiency, unless drops clocks enough to compensate.

I'm quite sure that
1) one Zen core(including l2)(which executes 2 hw threads) has much less transistors than an excavator module(which also executes 2 hw threads) while having the much better single thread performance.
2) Two Zen cores+their L2 caches have less transistors than a steamroller module.

But just comparing amounts of transistors are not apples to oranges comparisons.


And, the sizes of the cores itself are a very small part of the area(and even smaller part of the transistor count) of modern SoC chips.