ojas said:
The real reason they're not exceeding 6 cores is probably because of power issues and the fact that an 8-core extreme part at $1k would kill AMD's high end completely, as the fastest 6C/12T SKUs would have to be sold for $800 or less.
I disagree. First - at the high-end Intel is competing with Intel. Even a high end Opteron is preforming worse then Intel's enthusiast offerings when it comes to the most used software. While Opterons are great for bigger number of light threads (specially independent ones),Even though most Adobe and Autodesk software's computational parallelism will span across all cores, it benefits more from IPC ( and GHz ) increases because of the highly hierarchy dependent structure of computations. AMD has no laid foot here in the past years. What I am trying to say is that Intel $1k parts can't kill AMD because AMD does not have a remote, whats left of a direct competitor.
Second - we already have 8C/16T Xeons in the 150W envelope. Drop off all the transistors related to CPU to CPU communication and other specifically server based tasks and instructions, 2MB of L3 and it can maybe arrive in a 130W package.
Just my 50 cents, please feel free to correct me if my arguments were off.