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AMD Details Upcoming Bulldozer Architecture
Vigile writes "AMD is taking the lid off quite a bit of information on its upcoming CPU architecture known as Bulldozer that is the first complete redesign over current processors. AMD's lineup has been relatively stagnant while Intel continued to innovate with Nehalem and Sandy Bridge (due late this year) and the Bulldozer refresh is badly needed to keep in step. The integrated north bridge, on-die memory controller and large shared L3 cache remain key components from the Athlon/Phenom generation to Bulldozer but AMD is adding features like dual-thread support per core (but with a unique implementation utilizing separate execution units for each thread), support for 256-bit SIMD operations (for upcoming AVX support) all running on GlobalFoundries 32nm SOI process technology."
it wasn't very long ago that Pentium 4's were being smoked by Athlon64's selling for half the price.
It was 2002. By 2003 AMD was charging more for its parts than Intel was, which got Intel's attention, got them out of the meadow, and and got their horse back into the race.
Since then, AMD has been stumbling and throwing off gear hoping to keep Intel in sight.
Other fallacies:
"There does come a point where the increase in speed is not at all worth the extra cost."
That point is just above the netbook performance range.
"Calling AMD "ghetto" as you have in other posts is wholly incorrect"
They are and will forevermore be the "cheap chips" brand, not the "good chips" brand. Intel learned its lesson and will not repeat it.
"most people won't ever need that"
That's been said about every performance point since the first time Ada Lovelace cranked the loom too hard.
"AMD has the midrange-low end market cornered"
Not according to their revenue share numbers. They're getting killed even while giving about 3% better performance/price on average. People don't want their stuff because they know they're buying the off-brand, and because the machines they come in are wal-mart quality as well.
You make arguments about AMD being a value to you that are contradictory; you are willing to be more technical about using them to get the performance/price value out of them, but you aren't willing to be technical enough to use the raw performance that the Intel parts give you. Either you're a duffer, or you're a technical boy, but you can't argue both sides of the fence.