Quote Originally Posted by AliG View Post
If that's the case, then why only make such a small upgrade from the start? Common, your competition is bound to wow you at some point and time, and since they can't afford to keep designing new architectures at the rate intel can, k10 should have been a huge upgrade that at least doubled k8's performance as it was planned to last for multiple years. We can now see that amd plans to do a k10.5 and k11 very rapidly after k10's launch and hopefully they can improve their ipc and give the cpus more cache+higher clockspeeds, but still, that should have been done from the start, same way 65nm should have been down over a year ago for them, not try to fix it at the last moment, and that's why they got caught with their pants down
K10 is a major upgrade, and very similar to core 2 but with 3 complex decoders instead of Core 2's 3 simple + 1 complex, has slightly weaker OOO and smaller L2+L3, but retains a larger L1 cache, better instruction fetch bandwidth and the IMC advantage. What K10 needs is clockspeed, there's nothing remotely mediocre about the architecture. The Spec numbers don't tell much at all, as K8 performance is similar in spec to core 2, but in real world heavy SSE2 use core 2 blows away K8 and typically outperforms it in other typical applications. Tomorrow we'll know how K10 performs (hopefully) but I expect very good performance (clock for clock) particularly in video encoding/decoding, games and pure number crunch applications. Too bad the launch clock speeds will be low. Looks like reliable motherboard availability will be low as well for some time too. So for now, Intel remains in the lead till early Q1 2008.