Phil Coffman

AMD's Sweet-Spot Strategy: Desperation or Stroke of Genius?

Intel and AMD put multiple cores in CPUs because the chipmakers can no longer drive performance by increasing the frequency at the same rate as in the past.

I believe AMD's dual-GPU strategy is the result of AMD being unable to effectively compete with NVIDIA on the high end since at least 2005.

I know AMD says otherwise, that it was because of power consumption that they went with their approach (See venturebeat.com/2008/1.../).

However, the power consumption of the GTX 260, as near as I can tell, is actually better than that of the HD 4870. This strongly suggests that power consumption ought not to be a show stopper for a large die.

On Nov 28 11:59 AM schkube wrote:

> While it certainly is not a perfect analogy, but seems like Intel
> did a very nice job packaging two C2D CPU's on a single die, in the
> same fashion ATI is doubling up on GPU's on a PCB with the X2.<br/>
>
> You are likely correct that the X2 model will not last (the market
> should decide that) but to say that approach makes ATI a poseur may
> be a bit of a stretch.