Quote Originally Posted by kl0012 View Post
Buldozer is aimed at high-performance segment, as well as "Thuban". Supposedly Bulldozer will be faster then Thuban, so what is the sense to release Thuban at the same time frame? Again Istanbul is barely competitive against Nehalem and supposedly will be just crashed by Sandy Bridge in Q4 2010. This movie seems to me like an act of desperation (considering there was no plans for Istanbul in the desktop segment in AMD's official roadmaps).

Istanbul vs. Nehalem:
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17005
I think the 6 core will get replaced by a Bulldozer 6 core later on. Till then quad cores maybe based on Bulldozer. Its similar way to how Intel has used Nehalem and its shrink together in its product tree. Intel will eventually replace the quad nahelem with a shrunk. In a similar way AMD may have 6 core Thuban and 4 core Bulldozer running together and eventually replace the 6 core Thuban with a 6 core Bulldozer. Also the AMD part is 2.6Ghz while the x5550 is 2.66Ghz & with turbo its 3.06Ghz, so its quite nice to see how the 2435 vs x5550 battle is so close. If AMD does release a 2.8-3.0 Ghz hexa core processor with a TDP of around 140w it would be a instant hit.

Now for the people who say AMD cant make profit on the hexa core because it too dam huge at 346 mm2 as compared to 265 mm2 for the nehalem, well the die size is not the whole thing of the equation. There are numerous other things that determine how expensive the processor will be to make like the cache, IO system, etc.

Quote Originally Posted by saaya View Post
isnt it still today?
But Intel and AMD has given up the speed race what else can they do but make the cpu's more efficient and parallel in nature with addition of cores.