AMD Phenom II TWKR Black Edition spotted

[saaya]

3 vs 4 issue wide is extremely little difference. And the key problem is x86/x64. Other CPU archs easily scale to 10 issue wide. So for AMD staying at 3 issue wide is not an issue by itself. Specially not without HT. I would say that the 4 issue part in Core 2 is less than 5% used. For i7 with HT on its higher but still...

i dont think its just 5%... they did quite a jump in performance when they widened it up... 5% average performance maybe, but in some cases its 15% at least i think...

and lets even say its only 5%... well how many extra transistors do you need? look at core duo and core 2 duo, the diference is minimal, and you get a 5% boost... for the same boost from cache you have to increase the die size by probably at least 25%... at least... and to get a 5% perf boost by clockpeed you have to increase the clocks from 3ghz to at least 3150mhz... a whopping 150-200mhz extra...

and its not like they have to redesign the entire logic, we are talking about quadcores here, so you rework one core and just copy it 4 times... and its not a complete rework, you just add an execution unit like the ones you already have, and then you just need to tweak the decoder and some other logic a little bit... i mean geez, wth... we are talking about the second largest chip maker here with dozens of chip engineers and all they did for the past years is copy and paste almost exactly the same design and just add some extra logic here and there... how amd could ever come up with a64 from athlonxp with this way of designing their chips is beyond amazing actually... :P

come on amd! get the whip out on your engineers and let them do some actual work and not just maintentance and process node shrinking!