Intel Corp (INTC)

[rudedog]

Chipguy can probably help me understand some of this - but wouldn't the design standards that produced Barcelona have been in use when this guy was supposedly on the design team? And wouldn't the standards that produced Shanghai and Istanbul have been the ones he is denigrating?

Barcelona was pretty much a disaster. I have played with a few of those chips - hot, slow, temperamental, inconsistent. My experience with Shanghai was the opposite - methods for tweaking performance applied very consistently across most chips in the series, although with different headroom (but that's what binning is all about, I think). The power draw was lower than Barcelona across the board even for the top end chips, and performance for a given set of parameters was consistent and predictable. Not a Nehalem beater, but very clearly a whole different experience than the previous 2 years with Barcelona.

While I don't have any knowledge about Bulldozer aside from what I read here, I doubt that this guy's comments reflect much about Bulldozer's prospects one way or another, and based on his reasoning he might be one of those folks that is useful in a contrarian way - if he is selling, buy, if he is buying, sell.