Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

this is really a post about the futility of these power arguments relative to high vs. low IPC.

I agree with this. There are so many factors. All we can do is look at what power the final products consume and compare their performance and see which is more power efficient in total. It may be that Intel has a more power efficient microarchitecture, but AMD might have the advantage with SOI. Like I said in another post, if Prescott power consumption turns out to be very high as rumored, AMD is going to have more power headroom, which could result in a performance advantage. That is important because AMD needs to maintain equal or better performance than Intel or their ASPs will get killed just like in the past, leading to more losses, leading to me having to sell my AMD stock, which I'm not ready to do just yet. :)

Power is something that can also be optimized in later design revisions, so don't expect Prescott to always be a power hog. Intel will likely make large improvements over time by working on any number of things including microarchitecture tweaks, non-critical path power optimization, and transistor tweaks. It may be they can make some huge improvements in power later on, and that could open up a huge amount of frequency headroom.