jacobian :
de5_Roy :
the hell? dumping sr will worsen amd's situation with high margin products.
Why? Is it not clear this architecture will trail Intel forever. The current market mantra is to chase the best performance per/watt. AMD is losing here pretty badly and there is no fix in sight. Once a year AMD updates the architecture by increasing IPC a little, and then lowers clock frequency to lower TDP. But that process was way too slow. It's painful to watch. A bolder and probably quite smarter decision would be to put all of Bulldozer derived architectures on life support and design a new architecture with a view towards replacing the former in 3-4 years. AMD sells so little right now, it has little to lose.
![Er... what? o_O o_O](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
?
Kaveri is actually pretty amazing from a performance standpoint. The A8-7600 is gold, especially at 45W for a combined CPU and GPU. The problem is everyone is comparing the A10-7850K which is obviously just a higher clocked 7600 with the full iGPU enabled, it's grossly overpriced currently. I'm hoping AMD eventually creates a 7650 with a full 8 CU's (512 GCN cores).
As for the BD uArch, there is a long story behind that. The key difference between the BD uArch and everything else is the modularity of the chip's design. I'm not talking about the shared components here but how it's really cheap to create a custom chip based on the BD uArch, everything is plug and play design side. People often don't appreciate the insanely high man hour requirement is to design a high performance IC. The sheer size and complexity means you go over every trace and connection by hand to get optimum performance out of the chip. Any alteration to the chip means you gotta go back to the drawing board and redo lots of work. Intel has the budget and R&D size to just throw money at the problem and hire tons of engineers to brute force it. AMD lacks that budget and R&D size so they needed to find a way to design chips on the cheap. The modularity of the design means it's cheap(er) for them to design the chip, but it comes with it's own set of drawbacks, chiefly that your not having a ton of engineers crawling over every nm of your design optimizing it. BTW that's why we keep seeing 10~15% efficiency increases each generation, they keep finding things to fix and optimize.
Essentially AMD would of never won the design contracts with Sony and Microsoft if they hadn't used BD. They had the best offering for product performance (absolute performance + energy usage + space usage) then the competitors due to how cheap it was for them to make custom CPU's.
The market itself is actually splitting into different refined segments. Desktop has become saturated and people only buy new ones to replace old ones, gaming being the prime difference. Growth is currently seen in appliance and mobile, but mobile itself is a bunch of different categories with smartphones being different from tables and notebooks. There is money to be made in all of them, just gotta address them individually.