So armchair CEOs....

[Fox5]

Ok, AMD has had a rather sizable performance advantage over the Pentium 4. The top athlon 64 outperformed the top Pentium 4 by a noticable amount. So why didn't AMD take advantage of that, and make high clocked semprons, label them as Athlon 64s, and just cut their cache to miniscule amounts. They'd still offer competitive performance, and since cache has the largest die size of anything on the cpu, they'd greatly cut costs. Think, 2.4ghz and 2.6ghz Semprons with 128KB or 256KB cache. AMD could still keep the high end 1MB cache athlons to claim absolute performance dominance, and truly seperate their high end from their low end. They could either reap large profits with their cache cut chips, or flood the market with chip, high performing chips. In addition, it would have stemmed the overclocked market. Either they choose a cache cut chip and go for best performance per value, they go Intel and lose out entirely, or they have to shell out the extra dough to go for the 512KB and 1MB cache chips. For an architecture like the Athlon that gains so little from cache, it seems like it would have been a sensible way to greatly expand the amount of processors AMD produced.

 

[Keysplayr]

As if we didn't have enough of a blizzard of different processors out there. AMD is doing fine they way they are.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
As if we didn't have enough of a blizzard of different processors out there. AMD is doing fine they way they are.

It seems like it would allow them to greatly expand profits, by cutting costs per processor and being able to produce many more processors.

 

[BrownTown]

but by cutting costs they are also cutting performance to the smae levels as Intel, and so there would be no incentive for peopel to switch to AMD. AMD sees itself as a company that should be at 50% of CPU sales, not whatever much smaller percent they have now, so while they could make more money in the short term by getting high proffit margins, they likely feel they are better off gaiing marketshare while they have the performacne advantage. Now if both AMD and Intel are selling equivilent processors many more people will go with AMD becasue it has better brand recognition and is considered a more viable substitute to Intel than it was 5 years ago.

 

[aka1nas]

Why would they do this when they are selling every chip they produce?

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
but by cutting costs they are also cutting performance to the smae levels as Intel, and so there would be no incentive for peopel to switch to AMD. AMD sees itself as a company that should be at 50% of CPU sales, not whatever much smaller percent they have now, so while they could make more money in the short term by getting high proffit margins, they likely feel they are better off gaiing marketshare while they have the performacne advantage. Now if both AMD and Intel are selling equivilent processors many more people will go with AMD becasue it has better brand recognition and is considered a more viable substitute to Intel than it was 5 years ago.

Not ever AMD processor outperforms every Intel processor. They can keep the higher end processors, just make the 3000+ instead of a say 512KB cache 1.8ghz processor, make it a 128KB cache with a 2.4ghz processor. The only reason AMD's market share hasn't grown more than it has is lack of supply, replacing most of their lower end product lines with higher clocked lower cache cpus would allow them to produce more cpus at lower costs of production.

Why would they do this when they are selling every chip they produce?

Because cache is the largest area on the chip, and by making higher clock but lower cache chips for the chips they can, they could greatly increase production capacity.