Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Wouter Tinus]

Good approach, imo. Two suggestions to follow on it:
1. Take Dothans and Yonah's diesizes into account.

Ok, lets see. Dothan: 87mm2, Yonah: 90.6mm2, so they are about the same size. For comparison I took the two die pictures, resized them to the proper ratio and put them next to eachother. I used 445x327 pixels for Yonah and 500x279 for Dothan. This is what that looks like:

http://tweakers.net/ext/i.dsp/1130028013.jpg

You can see that a lot of space is saved in the L2 cache, but the logic transistors don't scale as good (though each core in Yonah is definately a lot smaller than Dothans). I'm not sure what else to make of this, but perhaps you can spot something interesting :).

2. You will hardly catch Intel with a lie. You can believe what they say. But you should always have Andy Grove's "only the paranoid survive" in mind when listening to what they say. In this case, they say Yonah has soandsomuch transistors. They don't say whether it is the physical transistors on the die or the transistors used for this particular product.

Do you know of a case where only active transistors were specified? They didn't do that when they announced Prescott and pretended it was 32-bit only. I remember everyone saying that there were 'too many' transistors on that core.