wbmw,
Interesting speculation.
As far as positioning of AMD CPUs, I think some people fall for AMD's pie in the sky roadmaps (Tench). Clawhammer will be a vanila desktop chip competing against .13 desktop Northwood (which will not have Jackson Technology), not Xeon, you are right about the software, which will be 32 bit, so the 64bit mode will be mostly unused, until the next version of Windows (Blackcomb) arrives.
On the Xeon side, it is questionable if AMD will actually field a competing processor, but if so, it will be the dual core Sledgehammer, not single core Clawhammer. With this in mind, my speculation would differ from yours in subtracting 30% IPC (Jackson Technology) from Northwood in Clawhammer matchup, and if the Sledgehammer is ever produced, it will definitely have higher IPC improvement than addition of Jackson Technology to Xeon Northwood.
And on another subject, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? <g>
Joe |
