Intel to show off Sandy Bridge at IDF next week, AMD counters with Zacate demo nearby

[onewingedangel]

It always confused me why Intel did not work harder to percolate Dothan to the desktop, it was clock for clock an equivalent to K8 and at equal or lower power.

It was 32bit only, and a lower clockspeed than the p4 - so it would have been a tough sell to the less tech-savy consumer.

Not to mention they had already spent a load of money on the p4 designs. It's not as if they could justify just writing that off - they cancelled Tejas when it become apparent that they needed a change of philosophy, and had the stopgap dual die processors to tide them over when they developed a proper desktop design (core 2).

Also it's worth considering they could sell laptop chips at a higher margin than desktop chips of similar spec.

Made more sense to recoup the development costs by actually selling the p4, which was a commercial if not critical success.

Also, it's worth going back now and testing a HT enabled p4 against an a64 - now that code is better threaded the p4 doesn't compare too badly.