Re: I would by no means call Conroe, Merom weak. These are strong cores sitting on an obsolete bus, making it next to impossible for these cores to compete with Opteron. Intel's absence from 4 socket market will persist until the launch of CSI.
Let me at least be clear that I am not calling Core 2 micro-architecture weak. I am calling Intel's MP strategy weak, which is to take a mobile/client optimized core and try to scale it up to servers. This is a great strategy for reusing an architecture in the maximum possible sense, but it does not adequately address the AMD competitive issue where they create an MP scalable architecture first, and then find ways to scale it down to the client and mobile segments.
And of course, AMD's strategy also becomes weak, for example, when comparing mobile products. They are struggling to produce a 35W part that is anywhere near competitive to Intel's parts in the same thermal envelope. And yet, in addition to offering very strong 35W parts (including the yet to be launched 35W Merom and 40W LV Woodcrest, both at 2.33GHz), Intel will be able to scale further down, all the way to ~10W ULV mobile parts (I believe the last rumor said it would be 9W, but I can't quite remember). AMD will have some additional advantage at 65nm, but I think they are fighting against their fundamental strategy to optimize around servers first, where they are forced to scale down technologies that are fundamentally more robust and higher power. It's a more difficult transition than the client/mobile optimized cores that Intel has with Core 2.
At the same time, Intel is very disadvantaged in the MP segment, because their cores do not have the features to scale upward. Traditionally, Intel has put many of these features in the chipset, but that decoupling will hurt them long term. They need to more tightly couple their server components to get the maximum performance and scalability, as AMD has done using HTT and IMC.
Going forward, we have a short term period where both companies will be exposed in their weak points, IMO. AMD will be exposed in mobile, and to some extent, the client space as well. Intel will be exposed in MP servers, and to a lesser extent the DP space. The DP space will be interesting, since I believe Intel has most of the core architecture necessary to get very good performance here, and AMD will be hard pressed to beat them. However, I do not ignore AMD's fundamental strengths, and believe that Intel will need to be at the top of their game to fight for this market.
In the longer term, I believe Intel will need to adequately address the server segment with CSI and their version of the integrated memory controller (most likely FBD based). This could happen as soon as Nehalem, but we will see how strong of a server offering Intel will have in this time period. Likewise, it sounds like AMD is busy developing a mobile optimized core, which will increase their strength in this segment. So it will be interesting in the longer term how the competitive landscape shifts. But I believe in the short term that each company will have definite strengths and weaknesses.
Re: I think Charlie said there is very little activity now on Tulsa. With all Tier-1s on Opteron, Tulsa may see the light of day in only 1 or 2 of the 5 of the Tier 1s.
I am quite certain IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, and HP will all support Tulsa with at least 1 sku. Intel is ponying up most of the work, so it would be stupid of them not to at least offer the choice. Charlie may be right that Tulsa is uninteresting to some of them, but that does not mean they will ignore Intel's still staggering amount of share and influence in this market. It might be, for example, that they won't implement Tulsa in their 4-way blade systems, as they have done with Xeon MP processors in the past, but I do believe it will be in the volume offerings for sure.
Re: Well, AMD is planning several RAS related advances in the near future, but it appears that all that RAS stuff (that was supposed to keep Opteron in low end according to Intel investors) amounted to nothing so far. Price, performance, power consumption rule. RAS is distant 4th.
There are many micro-segments of the market, some of them which demand RAS as their #1 concern. Others will demand performance as their #1 concern, while still others will demand power or price. I don't think there is any single "rule of thumb" in terms of the ordering. You have mission critical servers, large scale business and financial servers, broad based webservers a la Google, small application and print servers, etc. If you ask Google, they will tell you that they'll take whatever can offer the maximum compute density for the floor space and power delivery they can provide. If you ask Wall Street, they will demand whatever has the maximum uptime for a given year. I could go on, but you get the point.
Re: It appears that for now, the strategy of optimizing whole different cores for target market (notebook, desktop, server) is kaput, and the one core strategy is the rule of the game at both Intel and AMD (with exception of Itanium). Looking at the roadmaps, and I see the next 2 years when both Intel and AMD have just 1 core serving all these markets.
I believe AMD has already announced that they will have both a server optimized and mobile optimized core at some point. I believe their to be both pros and cons to this approach, just as there are pros and cons to having a single shared core. On one hand, a single core micro-architecture can enable the best reuse, the best technology focus, and the best time to market. On the other hand, having diverse cores means you get to optimize for the different strengths of each segments without having to live with the tradeoffs of a jack-of-all-trades. Go ahead and give the server chip a large die size, or power hungry features. Go ahead and give the mobile chip more P-states and a very aggressive voltage level. Of course, then you'll have to deal with repeating a lot of work. You'll have a technology that integrates very well into the server core, but takes extra design work to shoe-horn into the mobile core. You'll want to be consistent in your feature set, so you'll have to live with some features being dischordant with your micro-architecture. Maybe your mobile core should be in-order to get <5W power envelopes, but that will really hurt your single threaded performance. Lots of things to consider, when you have two separate designs.
Re: As I said, it's the same core. What do you see as a problem for K8L not being able to address low end segments, just as well as K8 is addressing them currently?
I do not believe K8 makes a good mobile chip for one thing, and I think K8L will be much better. The separately scalable voltage planes will help, but I think Intel will have the ultimate power to scale their voltages, right from the beginning. Intel also has the best technology for P-states and low latency power management. I remember seeing one review showing that it takes AMD 100x longer to switch between sleep states than it does Intel. That's a hard thing to overcome. Of course, you'll point out that all these issues *can* be overcome, and that AMD will be working on them. And my response will be to point out that AMD will certainly try, but Intel will have the benefit of this being on the forefront of their technology business plan. It's where Intel has been putting the R&D, it's where they have put the most focus. Merom is a mobile chip scaled to the client and server markets. It will be stronger in this area. AMD will try, but their chip is an MP server chip with much effort meant to bring it down in power and into client and mobile applications. Thinking intuitively, you should suspect that Intel will be stronger in mobile, while AMD will be stronger in servers. We'll eventually see if this intuitive point of view ends up being the case, but in the mean time, I would strongly bet that it would.
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