AMD Istanbul chip die picture

[villa1n]

Here's what Hans has to say:
"It's probably not a bad idea for AMD to take advantage of their relatively
small core size. At 45nm it can cram two cores (with 256 kB L1 total) into
30mm2. A single Nehalem core with 256 kB L2 also occupies ~30 mm2.

So in terms of IPC/mm2 you get two cores against one core with 2 threads."

It seems like the thread is missing the point of this artistic rendition... this is the key point here, in terms of competitive performance. And why he created the artistic rendition... because of this very fact. Core vs Core, amd's current architecture looks to be outmatched by nehalem, in terms of raw power, ipc etc... but it has an advantage of size, and if amd exploit it, it could even the playing field.