Quote Originally Posted by RussC View Post
The SuperPi and single thead tests are not useless. As I and others have posted, the company that wins the single thread/core and internal memory/cache performance, gets the spoils, plain and simple. Again, either company can stack cores till the cows come home and play the leap frog game of performace king for a year till the next higher core count part comes out(the same way AMD and NVDA are fighting it out). But the company with the better core/thread performance wins market share, sorry.

RussC
I don't agree with this. It could very easily be the case that Intel wins at single thread and low thread counts and AMD wins at high thread counts. They can both stack chips, but that doesn't mean that they can both stack chips equally. A shared design will be able to stack significantly more chips before running into thermal, power, or die space limitations.

As for market share, chips with different strengths will capture different segments of the market. A strong multicore design could capture market share in the critical high-margin server market. It would also be quite useful for media/rendering/encoding workstations and scientific computing. Certain power users that use heavy multitasking and heavy mutithreaded apps (like myself) would prefer the extra cores. While Intel would continue to capture more market in the low-threaded segment such as gamers, certain benchers, and office/home users.

I don't really see a problem with this. Having choices is good. No one processor is going to effectively process all types of code.