Tony, Re: "In defense of Hector in this case, though, we don't know what all he's throwing into those cost calculations, do we? I mean, he may be including things like equipment depreciation, maybe even payroll. These would tend to overwhelm the savings that should be evident due to die size and yields alone."
Hector is too high up to immerse himself in these things. He gets the 10-20% number from one of the number crunchers elsewhere. But, in the context of comparing the Athlon and Pentium 4 die sizes, well....
Since we don't know what the 10-20% number includes, there is no completely accurate comparison we can draw. However, we *can* point out that despite a rather huge advantage in die size, AMD predicts a much smaller advantage in cost structure. Since Intel is likely to demand at least a small premium for their CPUs, AMD will need this cost savings.
There may be no way of knowing if this cost advantage will disappear in the future, but given AMD's need to have a far smaller die just to achieve 10-20%, it is reasonable to assume that if Intel reduced their die to where it was reasonably close to AMD's, than Intel would gain back the cost advantage.
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