Re: Yonah is the only next generation product 6 months from now. Paxville is 90nm. 65nm products in this timeframe are: Cedar Mill, a single core 65nm shrink of Prescott; Presler, dual core Cedar Mill (two dies in one package); Dempsey will not be in this timeframe but in order to make it complete Dempsey is Presler with bus arbitration making it suitable as Xeon MP. Presler and Dempsey will be 130+W. As Cedar Mill, Pressler, and Dempsey are derived directly from Prescott
I'm not sure if Presler and Dempsey should be pooh-poohed, just because they are shrinks of Prescott. Process shrinks offer a much better improvement in terms of frequency and power than tweaking the design can deliver (of course, I expect major overhauls of the design, such as the Conroe micro-architecture, to have very good MIPS/Watt, but I am speaking of implementation tweaks here). I think a shrink to a more advanced 65nm process should make Dempsey and Presler competitive with what AMD has in the first half of next year.
Paxville, meanwhile, sounds like a Smithfield processor with proper bus arbitration. It will allow dual cores in the Xeon MP space, which has been severely lacking in competitiveness for Intel. The main reason AMD has been given a chance to win so much business here is that the main competition has been 3.0GHz single core 32b Gallatin on a 3 year old chipset. Potomac/Cranford and Twincastle managed to create a far more compelling platform relative to AMD's single core Opteron, which force AMD to have to gain share by shifting their manufacturing quickly to dual core. A dual core Paxville will have most of the single core performance of Potomac and Cranford, except it will also enable dual core. On the IBM Hurricane chipset with snoop filter, the performance may actually be good enough to level the playing field. And by the way, power is a lot less of an issue in the 4-socket market.
Re: Yonah will be the highest performing T&L processor for at least three quarters ('at least' as we don't have any performance info on Taylor). A lower power version of X2 however will be the highest performing DTR and the only 64b cpu in the mobile segment. Dual core Yonah though high performing in T&L is 32b only and because of it's performance and image it'll sell like hot cakes. Turion will continue to sell as well on price and 64b (only as small part of the T&L market).
I'm hoping that Yonah in 32b mode still has higher performance than the low power X2 in 64b mode, which will make 64-bits look like the most useless feature in the mobile space. AMD may have an advantage in DTR where they can scale the X2 to higher frequencies, but for everything 2.2GHz and below, I think Yonah will have the advantage.
Re: All in all AMD will retain rather relevant power and performance advantages in the Opteron space. It's desktop processors will remain the best until Conroe at least (imo the advantage will stretch well beyond it though). That's two out of three major market segments.
I wouldn't pin all your hopes on this. Dual core was the best selling point AMD had, now that all their other exclusive features now have Intel equivalents (EM64T, XD, EIST, C1E, etc). When Intel gets dual core, AMD is back to competing on price/performance, which has been somewhat successful for them in the past, but it's not good enough for major gains in market share. The old argument comes back about why risking going with the other supplier when Intel can get within 10% or 15% of AMD's price/performance.
I do agree that Intel will have to have superior price/performance to win back the business that AMD has already captured, though. Most customers aren't willing to make multiple switches, but if Conroe ends up impressing, I wouldn't count on AMD's gains being set in stone.
Re: Don't you think this is a bit more balanced than just using terms like 'AMDroids' and 'dismal'?
I was responding to an AMDroid, so it was fairly appropriate.
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