Quote Originally Posted by -Boris- View Post
Thats 50% more cores, 27% higher frequency and 200% more cache, and still cooler than Agena. Of course you can't just extrapolate this gains into 32nm, but I think it's reasonable to say that we would be able to see 33% more cores, higher frequencies (even more with turbo) and an extra 2Mb cache and still have a smaller chip than Thuban. Throw in some core enhancements and you're set.
Would it be as competitive as BD? Maybe, maybe not, but I think it's a bad sign when you first really new architecture in 12 years isn't clearly a better choice than the old one. Intel did this once, they crippled their old P6 in favor for Pentium 4 a century ago, it turned out that then the improved P6 came back 5 years later it was twice as fast as their current Pentium 4, and that's dual vs. dual, their P6 derived architecture had more thermal room for extra cores and came as C2Q delivering even more performance.
Fair comparision, but with a brand new architecture the important point is the 2nd or even 3rd generation. The first one is very often buggy and not well optimized. Intels very first S423 Pentium4 was crap, the Socket 478's Northwoods were quite good, but then Preshott was the end, because they could not control the power consumption, and the pipeline got ridiculously long.

I do not see these problems here, the only problem is low-IPC, and a still not well running process at GF. Both could be fixed in the next revision. Then you still have superiour clocks. One should not forget, that Llano's CPU part @32nm is neither running well. Only ~3GHz clock, with OC you can reach maybe 3.6, Bulldozer seems to reach easily 4.8Ghz, with 8cores... and it has AES, AVX, SSE4.1/4.2... IMO really the better option to have build Zambezi, especially if the next revisions will gain some IPC.