Quote Originally Posted by Solus Corvus View Post
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.
What, that argument doesn't ring true, and certainly hasn't happened at all in the market. So far in the multi-core world, the fastest wins market share. AMD will never make a dent in INTC 85%+ market share with what your talking about and will be religated to the price/performance end of the curve. AMD wont, hasn't and has lost significant market share for nearly 7 years being second fiddle with slower parts. So far, AMD has lost on all those market segments you talk about. Again, they will never take back any market share with what I see so far.

With that said, we'll wait and see what BD really is to gauge where AMD goes from here.

RussC