Re: I think what AMD calls a Revision (f late appears to be a feature set / list. A revision may have multiple steppings before and during release.
I know this, but while some guys get very excited about new AMD mini steppings, they rarely offer huge performance gains. More like small power savings or +1 performance bins, not >20% performance boosts that would allow a rev F part to compete with Conroe.
Re: Revision requires large staffing, stepping does not.
That's not quite true. It might take very few resources on the design side, but then you have to do backend work, create new masks, validate the part logically, electrically, and thermally, write documentation (if applicable), communicate changes to customers (if applicable), manage the product transition through the factories, etc, etc. Every change has an impact, and if AMD plans to do this several times in between major revisions, it would take an expansive and coordinated effort.
Re: But I am a little confused to what you are comparing. Isn't "Core" Yonah? Or does what you call Core cover Conroe/Merom as well?
When I say Core, I mean NGA, not Core Duo. The public name given to NGA by Intel was Core micro-architecture, but it's rather unfortunate that Yonah is also called Core Duo, because it presents a lot of confusion. On the other hand, much of Core micro-architecture was leveraged, or at least inspired by Yonah, so there is at least some kind of relationship. But these kinds of improvements are not visible to the end-user in the first place. So when they see Core Duo T2600 and Core [whatever] T7600, they'll see the higher number and know that Merom is better. I guess that's about all you can do these days, given that there are too many nuances to processor performance for any layman to understand completely.
AI
