NaS, Re: If Prescott isn't speedstep enabled why bring up the strawman argument that enabling it would cool things down?
DBS is a funny thing. It's absolutely essential for the mobile space because people value battery life, and it's becoming a big deal in the enterprise space because it arguably saves on power in dense compute areas with a lot of daily usage. However, it is almost moot on the desktop, where few people outside of the enthusiast community use their computer intensively enough to worry about a larger electric bill, and the things plug into the wall, so battery life is a non-issue.
Unfortunately, DBS doesn't change things like TDP or product design specifications, so it won't enable that magic form factor made from a specially modded VCR, but it is the solution to average power dissipation, which may become more of an issue later on (or may become more of a marketing bullet sooner). The point is that if the market really does start worrying about electrical bills and AMD can market Cool & Quiet as a sellable feature, then it won't take long for Intel to follow, because DBS is already present in the Prescott micro-architecture. In fact, Intel uses it both in the Nocona and Mobile Prescott versions of the chip.
So while it's a moot subject in some respects, the take home is that there is no market yet for such a technology on the desktop, and if there were, then it wouldn't remain exclusive to AMD for long.
Re: When you question other posts you use terms like obviously and belittle the original poster.
I consider myself a pretty laid back poster. Maybe you're reading into the rhetoric more than you should. The only thing that amazes me is that people could argue so vigorously for AMD as if they were part time marketeers, but without the sense to realize the most business wise and realistic strategies. AMD is doing the right thing by going after server market share and improving their margins. Hoping for a desktop takeover based on people saving dollars and cents on their electric bill is wishful thinking in the extreme. The alternative would be to once again capitalize on desktop market share while their feature set is still relatively exclusive, but the whole "volume is our vaccine" fiasco that they tried a couple years ago was one of the worst corporate strategies ever devised, and it plumetted AMD's ASPs into the sub-60 dollar range.
If you want to speculate on where AMD is really capable of winning, go back to discussing Opteron, as well as AMD's chances of winning additional designs from IBM and HP. These kinds of things would be huge. Much more of a splash compared to the drop in the bucket that is K8's power savings over Prescott/Nocona.
