Exactly. However I think it's pretty clear that the other camp is already trying to exploit it. A handful of well placed shills can have a pretty big affect.
It's a nice elegant solution to having extra cores with less die space, however intel on a smaller node will be able to compete core for core at some point, without the performance tradeoff.
The only question is can you keep the 'core' lead.
Which tradeoff? I think it's the other way around, intel is trying to pseudo mock a dual core with dual threads. I see the tradeoff being slightly increasing performance while reducing die space.
I'm not sure what the tradeoff of replacing 2 full cores with 2 full but faster cores would be. There is no evidence whatsoever to point to and say a SB die size is a good tradeoff over an Interlagos, Valencia or Zambezi die size.
There is the Osbourne Affect, however I wonder how big that really is. CPU's are dirt cheap anyway.
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