Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

wbmw -

There's no mystery. AMD underestimated the kinds of circuit design changes required to get a performance benefit out of SOI.

Yes, this is pretty much the conventional wisdom, but my point is if AMD simply fabed Hammer on bulk silicon they should have at least been able to match the frequency of their mainstream products. Barton is somewhat frequency limited by it's larger L2, but Athlon64 was intended to have only 256K L2 cache so it should have at least matched the TB speed and probably more with the 2 extra pipeline stages, plus it would have been out long ago. So maybe the question is, was SOI the biggest blunder in AMD's history?