Quote Originally Posted by Motiv View Post
AMD will position itself against a comparable Intel chip. The amount of cores/modules is irrelevant compared to the results that it gives.
Uhm, thats what i said.AMD isnt positioning this above SB ,its not aiming at SBE,AMD positions this against 2600K (the highest AMD FX).
And while amount of cores/modules is irrelevant/The results are.They can however differ very greatly (one app a win for amd ,another for intel etc.)

While Core size isnt some defining metric, its logical to assume amd wont pull any miracles, if core is smaller than SB (and it is) than its safe to assume it will be weaker.
HT and sharing resources is another thing, and more relevant to the MT tasks.Thats why we cant expect stunning superpi performance ;-).
Ergo, i dont agree that core size has nothing to do with performance that can be extracted from it :P.

As for the speed, yes pipeline is longer thus its a high frequency design, however the smaller the chip the easier it is (its smaller than thuban thats for sure)

True, the BD cores are known to be higher in speed, due to the longer pipeline. However, this is a brand new chip and is an unknown with regards to speeds reached. I highly doubt you'll be seeing 5ghz in ST, let along MT
Well, im already seeing 4.8ghz from three sources.So i dont think that 5ghz from retails isnt possible.Its not even a stretch,and thats MT.
I think you're taking the BD chip as some sort of messiah for AMD. What it is is a very capable MT chip. If its IPC is anywhere close to Intel, and the speed of the chip can exceed intels offering, then they'll have a good solid chip for the next 4/5 years to work with. I am not holding my breath on this, as I still see AMD as a low-med type of company (GPUs of course a separate issue). I do think it's MT performance will be quite spectacular due to the amount of cores it can have. Desktop wise, I still feel Intel will have the upper hand (something that a lot of fanboys will find quite distasteful to hear).
No im not.If that was the case, BD would have 8 comparable to SB cores with greater overclockability, and i dont think thats even possible.
However it can be "smart" enough chip to be comparable in ST, and have upper hand in most MT.
Desktop wise, theres really small amount of apps, that need ultra strong x87 FPU performance.From top of my head i can only think of superpi and pcsx2.
In the rest differences, while may be there, are just academic.In games, we are pretty much always GPU limited after certain threshold.
And now games are moving to MT.Everything is slowly moving to MT.Sysmarks and similar software are pointless benchmarks for 99% of population.
And so on.Only MT performance still matters much.Multitasking, compression, encryption, video encoding, seti and similar software.

@Informal
Last i read, there were estimates of ~250mm2.Maybe im wrong tho, could you point me to a source of this 300m2 estimate ?