Originally Posted by
Opteron146
That's traditional, old thinking, it was true until the leakage went through the roof. For IPC you need lots of transistors, hence the fat cores of e.g. intels current architecture, but leakage will be worse and worse with every shrink. Thus the new idea is to cut as much transistors when it does not hurt that much. It's like with a car engine, you can easily construct an 8 cylinder engine with ~500 hp, but if you around 800 hp and up it gets tricky and you have to use lots of time & money to find and build some really complicated tricks. In short: the return of investments gets less and less.
So in future it is easier to build smaller cores. Bulldozer is just the first generation. I expect some IPC improvments in later versions again, but they won't cost too much transistors ;-)