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Intel Announces Major Reorg To Combine Mobile and PC Divisions
MojoKid writes: For the past year, Intel has pursued what's known as a "contra-revenue" strategy in its mobile division, where product is deliberately sold at a loss to win market share and compete effectively. This has led to a huge rise in tablet shipments, but heavy losses inside Intel's mobile division. Today, the company announced that it would take steps to fold its mobile and conventional processors into a single operating division. While this helps shield the mobile segment from poor short-term results, it also reflects the reality that computing is something users now do across a wide range of devices and multiple operating systems. Intel may not have hit anything like the mobile targets it set out years ago, but long-term success in laptops, tablets, and smartphones remains integral to the company's finances. Desktops and conventional laptops are just one way people compute today and Intel needs to make certain it has a robust long-term presence in every major computing market.
Seems like they want to conceal how well/poorly they are doing in the mobile sector. Makes a certain amount of sense most people see the mobile market as the hot new future.
This is Intel basically admitting defeat in the mobile space. It's good they don't feel so cocky anymore. Competition is good for everyone.
Short answer: an A8X won't work at 3 GHz, period.
Long answer:
All CPU, and other digital logic circuits, designs have a maximum target frequency at which they can operate correctly.
And by targeting a higher maximum frequency there is penalty to pay in area, power and performance. A well designed CPU targetting 3 GHz but running at 1.5 GHz will consume more power and perform worse than a well designed CPU targetting 1.5 GHz.
All available evidence and educated guessing points that Apple's CPUs are in fact targetting the frequency range in which they are shipping (~1.5 GHz) and there is no chance in hell they will work at much more than 2 GHz.