Re: AMD planning 45nm 12-Core 'Istanbul' Processor ?

>
> They'd better don't screw up on this one - they already used up all
> the margin of error they had, and then some.  But then, it's not the
> first time AMD is on the brink of extinction, and they always came
> back even stronger than anyone, including but not limited to INTC,
> could expect.  K7 in 1999, K8 in 2003 - both times Intel got their ass
> whipped big time for a couple years straight... Why not this time
> again?  Wish them luck - without AMD the whole CPU world would be
> boring and damn expensive.
>
> NNN

Intel got their butts whipped because of their own greed and short 
sightedness. The Pentium 4 was a wrong way dead end street, and it took 
Intel a long time to realize that. The P4 is a rather inefficient
processor, 
and it was not difficult for AMD to make something much faster. Intels 
marketing machine did like Microsoft - they hyped it up and pushed it with

everything they had. AMD got complacent and made a huge mistake with the 
Phenom. Phenom easily kicks the P4s butt, but Intel's core
microarchitecture 
runs circles around it. The ball is in AMDs court and I can't wait to see 
what AMD does with it...

Multi cores are nothing new - Sun has had them for years, and IIRC they
are 
working on (and may be in production with) a 16 core/32 threaded cpu. Last

Monday I saw plans for a 256 core cpu, but I don't think it's in
production 
yet. It is, however, the future. We can't clock the current technology
much 
faster without exotic cooling, and we can't get much smaller then we are 
now, but we can slap dozens of cores on a cpu and make up for it to some 
extant.