dan3 - As it stands, much of that capacity looks useless since chips large enough to make good use of all that bulk silicon capacity (as opposed to SOI capacity) would dissipate too much heat.
That is what AMD expects and I as well. And yes, heat dissipation is a concern in server and especially in HPC segment - but obviously still not important enough to shift market shares very quickly in the volume part of it (2-way servers).
For mobiles (since energy consumption is just the other side of the very same medal) Intel already has an appropriate solution.
In desktop space I only see one regional market (Japan) where heat dissipation matters already today. In other parts of the planet, I never heard of people buying Barton because it consumes some 20 percent less energy than Northwood. The problem is you cannot see, hear of feel it unless you open the case and touch the heatsink. Very few people do this.
But we already talk about battery runtimes for mobiles - for the reason people do realize it. And i am sure it is only a matter of time when we will have power-consumption benchmarks for Desktop-Systems as well. And PowerNow! in Desktops. And hard-undervolting communities.
At current price levels, the energy bill for the power the CPU consumes over the lifetime is in the same ballpark of the pricetag of the CPU (assuming an office-system running 800 days in four years for eight hours.
We had this paradigm change in the automobile sector: Before first oil shock (1973 iirc) people talked about horsepower of their cars enginges primarily. Today, its fuel-consumption.
In the meantime, Diesel-engines became popular.
The question is when somebody is bringing the topic up for desktop PCs. Maybe we need another energy shock.
In essence, as for your thesis above: Centrino-Concept is at least a very strong indication Santa Clara is very well aware of the market's desires. Plus has a the marketing-power to influence desires to a certain extent. Plus has a product already to make Low-power dual-core CPUs from and utilize their fabs with it. No, i dont expect much useless Intel-capacities - unless the world is perceiving AMDs products as a clearly better choice at the point of sale.
K.
Facts are irrelevant to the emotional brain
