Quote Originally Posted by JF-AMD View Post
Bingo, we have a winner. People don't buy architecture and cores aren't available a la carte.

You buy a processor and that is the most discrete level that you really want to get down to. Arguing below that is less productive.

What is the performance, price and power consumption of the processor, that is what matters.
Exactly. John, you know your work better than me, so please. Your goal is to sell CPUs, fooling the customers if necessary. You load your CPU with all kinds of workloads. Your perfomance figures are only valid when you load the CPU to the max. Nobody is saying that the CPU will be bad is this situation, but things don't work like that most of the time and you know it.

I'll tell you what's productive. I use app X, what processor gives me the best perfomance, perfomance/price, etc? If my application doesn't load the CPU to 100% I don't care about what it does when it is at 100%. No 100% in this case means no app with 12/16/whatever number of threads the CPU has. If my app is restricted to 2 threads, or any other number below the max, your CPU will underperform compared to the competition. You know that there are more CPUs running below and way below 100% load than fully utilized. Your competitor is not the leader in everything except maybe price without reason, some people will never get it. You can attack them with perfomance where it matters or with words for the fool, and I don't see a lot of the former. Athlon64 was such a success because the core was a lot better than Netburst, not because its "socket level" (what a term...) perfomance was better. Unless BD's integer "clusters" are significantly faster than the ones present in the current generation of AMD CPUs you'll still lag behind Intel. We'll talk again when BD is released. If I remember about it, which is going to be difficult.