Quote Originally Posted by -Boris- View Post
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You can’t say for sure that’s the process. Intel have an incredibly good process with their 32nm, but SB-E with roughly the same size as Bulldozer consumes roughly the same power.
But offer vastly different performance. The point is to get as much performance per watt.
Intels very good process just isn’t that good when you make a 2 billion trannie chip! So, that intels process gets just as bad when they try to make a gargantuan chip themselves is an indication that the size is too big to manufacture at lower power or higher frequencies.
Westmere EX had 2.6B transistors, 513mm^2 and burns the same power as a BD and it outperforms it in more or less anything. While I agree that GF's process is not as bad as people think ( performance wise, not yield wise ) it still has some challenges to overcome.

Btw, BD isn't 2B transistors, it's actually 1.2B ( a much more realistic number, the other one left 800m transistors unexplained, 1 module = 213m x 4 = 852m for the cores and L2, add another 380 for the L3 and you end up with roughly 1.25B )