Elmer:
AMD lost billions because of the ATI purchase was ill timed. That is not to say that it won't be a good purchase in the long run. We shall see as it normally takes 5 years for such thing to bear fruit.
I could say that Itanium was a multi billion dollar bust. The only way its making money was to write off the large development expenses and have most of its expenses borne invisibly by the x86 cash cow. In any other company, it would have been long gone.
That said, Barcelona did relatively well. It still beats Dunnington in 4P SPECfp_rate2006 (170 vs 156) and blows it away in Virtualization work. Pretty good for a "failed" CPU.
Shanghai is better though. While it can be plugged into any Barcelona server and workstation socket, Nehalem can't do the same to any current C2Q server or workstation. So even when Nehalem servers and workstations come out, there will be a 12 month delay before purchases will ramp up due to customer validation of the platform. Shanghai thus will have a short validation period as only the "core" change needs to be validated. So Nehalem might dent Shanghai sales in Q2 and Q4 2010, Shanghai has 1-2 years to get better too.
Thus, you are comparing a 1 year into the future CPU to a currently sold one. That is a constant fallacy both sides are guilty of from time to time. If we reverse the look, 2.7GHz Shanghai does what to year old Xeons (73xx and 53xx). It beats them badly in 2P SPECint_rate2006 (136 versus 116) and at 4P SPECint_rate2006 (249 versus 214). SPECfp_rate2006 is no contest at 2P (210 versus 119) and at 4P (118 versus 67.3). Should I be saying that Shanghai beats Clovertown by 2X in SPECfp_rate2006, so Clovertown is destined for the junk heap and Intel with it? No, that isn't a good characterization and neither is yours with Nehalem.
Pete
