Quote Originally Posted by Smartidiot89 View Post
So I take it you're still ignoring the facts that AMD have said openly that GlobalFoundries 32nm didn't reach AMD's expectations in both performance and that yields are bad? The last two quarterly calls they've talked about it with media and investors, they also issued a press release before their Q3 results saying projections for that quarter would be lower because of bad yields at their 32nm node.

Llano was also still projected to enter the market at 3,0+ GHz yet only retailed at 2,9 GHz, it was also supposed to have launched late-2010 and not mid-2011. Llano is also in extremely short supply both in the retail space, but also with OEM's. 32nm is horrid right now and facts are that AMD aren't happy with it.

There is no doubt 32nm "works" but it's still a dog with horrible yields, which needs to be fixed and is reflected upon in both of their 32nm products.
I don't ignore anything, but lower yields than expected is not the same thing as the finished chips perform worse than 45nm counterparts. On the contrary we have numbers showing that Llano consumes less power than Athlon II despite a GPU. Llano or BD would most likely not even be feasible on 45nm. So even if 32nm yields isn't where AMD want them to be I think it's safe to say that a 32nm Thuban would perform better than a 45nm Thuban. You are forgetting that the chips that currently has yield problems are record breakers when it comes to transistor count. It's not surprising yields is bad so far. Yields would be better with smaller chips, so that's just another reason why 32nm Thuban would be better of. You still can't blame GloFo for BD's shortcomings as some people do, the amount of speed needed to make BD competitive isn't possible on any process, especially not when taking thermals into account.

Even if 32nm isn't where AMD expected it's still most likely to give cooler chips and/or higher frequency headroom considering the evidence that we have.

Quote Originally Posted by Smartidiot89 View Post
Talking about Bulldozer, it is also very possible AMD are running specific functions at lower clocks, which can impact performance greatly.
If so, and if these functions cripple BD considerably, and they expect yields to improve over the next two years allowing them to run these functions at full speed, shouldn't we expect a successor with radically improved performance? AMDs current projections isn't to promising.



So, nothing, still, points at Thuban on 32nm would perform worse than Thuban on 45nm. It should perform much better and with Llanos IPC improvements you could call it a day. Thuban still has higher performance per mm² than BD taking processes into account, that don't bode well for the future.