Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
This way you have 4 new FPUs ,now shared, that produce only 25% less throughput than 8 "full" ones in CMP (without SMT probably) and all this saves you considerable die area and grants you some TDP and clock headroom. Pretty neat idea isn't it?
Only neat if you get more than 25% higher frequencies. I doubt that doubling the FPUs would make a big hit on frequencies. The FPUs count for a very small part of total die area so saving mm˛ isn't worth it. And I doubt higher power consumtion would would lower the frequencies much.