Replies to post #63357 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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Re: Well now that is really Apples to Oranges. If you compare SV Banias to LV Dothan do the same on the AMD side and compare Newcastle to Turion.

Turion uses specific low power transistors and an entirely different back-end design that is not comparable with the Athlon 64, while Dothan LV and Dothan SV are exactly equivalent, except for a different voltage. Therefore, while we can compare Dothan LV with Banias, but we can't compare Newcastle to Turion, unless there is a version of Newcastle with similar low power 130nm transistors to use as a reference.

Re: Wrt Prescott design, frankly, what you are suggesting is the chaps at Intel designed something they knew it will suck power like hell and won't scale nevertheless in the first place, increasing pipeline-lengths which is helpful to scale frequency, but useful only if it scales indeed? Interestingly, I have more confidence in the sanity of Intels minds than you seem to have. :-)

Prescott was originally supposed to scale to 5GHz, and Tejas was supposed to scale beyond even this. Intel made these predictions at one of their analysts conferences in early 2003. It only took them a year to cancel Tejas and redo their entire roadmap for power efficient micro-architectures. Obviously, your confidence in Intel is based on the ideal that they knew the impact of the power wall before it hit them. Obviously, they didn't or else they would not have even developed Prescott.