Front Page - AMD: Core Count War Over?

[ragejg]

Techspot reports (http://www.techspot.com/news/40740-amd-efficiency-will-soon-be-more-important-than-core-count.html) on AMD's efforts to increase efficiency over core count HERE (http://www.techspot.com/news/40740-amd-efficiency-will-soon-be-more-important-than-core-count.html).

Emil Protalinski of Techspot spoke with AMD's Donald Newell about what could be a change of pace for the Sunnyvale, CA semiconductor company.

"AMD says that the core war will end soon and will instead be replaced by an efficiency war. In the coming years, useful on-die specialized computing capabilities will be more important than the core count."

Ok, so we had a MHz war that turned into a GHz war, which then turned into a core-count war... and that itself may morph into this "efficiency war". Is this a correct projection?

I prefer a "robotic teddy bear war" myself, but AMD hasn't responded to my requests.

[GamblerFEXonlin]

According to real world technologies sandy bridge architecture article, it seems Sandy Bridge will be much more efficient per-core, while AMD bulldozer architecture have more cores and less performance per core. They also might have a dual-issue core, that can do two integer operations per core (but not floating point/vector). What will be faster, a mostly dual threaded core or Intels hyper threading? When it comes to specialized instructions, Intel might score high with their cores can do a whole 256bit AVX SIMD in one clock cycle and improved memory access units.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT091810191937&p=6