It is always refreshing to see some new hardware coming out. Needless to say that the more exciting stuff always concerns the high-end solutions but not everybody is in the market for this kind of toy. From a financial standpoint, the low end has always been the "bread and butter" for any company and who doesn’t believe it just needs to check Intel’s latest statements regarding their Atom sales.
In the last months, AMD has gained substantial market share. Some of it has been offset by the slumping Opteron sales but the net effect is still an increase in market share. With the current CPU architecture, there is very little chance to compete against Intel’s Core i7 but again, if Intel has Nehalem and Atom as their key players, that leaves the door wide open for everything else in between. After the original Phenom, which was arguably a dud, Phenom II has picked up performance and, especially in the AM3 flavor, has reached parity or has outpaced most of the Core2 processors, at least on a $ for $ basis.
Phenom II, though, is costly to manufacture; 758 million transistors, even if they are crammed into 258 mm2, still take up 258 mm2 which translates in a limited number of die per wafer. In order to remain price-competitive especially in the lower market segment, AMD needs a smaller die with high performance and the latter is something that the original Athlon X2 can no longer deliver, not even with migrating the design to a 45 nm process. On the other hand, all current IC designs, including Phenom (II) are fairly modular, with the individual building blocks comprising the cores, the NB/IMC and the system request interface (SRI). In a nutshell, the recipe in this case was to take two cores and tie them to the dual channel NB/IMC after stripping out the 6 MB L3 cache. On the HT side, the known-good SRI didn’t need any replacement, therefore, everything stayed as usual.
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