Jaguar will not be found in any 40nm parts.

By your logic the ultimate processor would have 1 stage long pipeline (ie no pipelining), but of course they don't. Its so much more complicated than your simple explanation. Longer pipelines reduces the amount of gates required to implement each stage (as its smaller) which reduces the propagation delay of each step which increases maximum frequency. This is independent of IPC.

The only area a longer pipeline reduces performance is in branch misprediction, as the pipeline needs to stall as it gets flushed. However, in this case and in many cases, you can get a sizeable increase in max frequency with only a minor increase in branch misprediction penalty. It says in the article that they are getting 10% higher frequency from one stage longer pipeline, so branch misprediction has gone from 13 to 14 cycles, or a 7.7% bigger penalty. Given a branch prediction rates are ~85-90% even in the Pentium days, that 7.7% increase only occurs on 10-15% of branches (which make up ~25-33% of average code).

Long story short, 10% higher frequency, smaller than 10% penalty = net gain in performance. Its about finding the optimal point between reducing stage propagation delays (the returns get smaller the more stages you add) and the increase in branch mis-prediction (which increases linearly with pipeline length). Prescott didn't work for many reasons, not just pipeline length (which has 31 stages long, far longer than Jaguar anyway). Just saying longer pipeline = no improvement without even a basic analysis of the architecture is just incorrect.

Hmm... Your explanation makes sense. Thank you.

All good man, I think Intel's 'megahertz at all costs' strategy during the P4 days jaded most people regarding changing architecture to support higher freq's. But like everything, the reality is always more complicated than at first glance.

AMD's K8 had longer pipeline than AMD K7, yet it featured _much_better IPC.

Jaguar is an evolution of the Bobcat core, which itself was a completely different design from Bulldozer and was aimed at low-power applications.

Do low-power applications need powerful FP and AVX?
Would has it not been better to use sharing for FP and AVX? Would it?
Shared Fetch and Decode would have been of some use to lower power consumption in low performance cpus. Wouldn't it?

Great, another ignorant person to comment.

I think AMD fans do see the BIG picture, that picture being a future where there is no competitor to intel in the x86 market, and intel basically does just enough to keep the corpse of AMD at bay and keep the anti-monopoly guys off their back, all while charging whatever they like. Sure ARM will be a competitor, and I really root for them to keep their awesome progress going, but they are many years away from catching up to intel in the performance stakes (if they can at all, intel's yearly R&D is bigger than the company ARM Holdings Inc itself).

If you don't like AMD then thats fine, but surely everyone wants some competition so that innovation keeps bubbling away and prices stay reasonable? You should thank hardcore AMD fans who take the hit and buy slower AMD processors, indirectly they are helping you buy cheaper more powerful Intel one's.

How is giving Intel a monopoly "best for the consumer" huh? Please show us ONE, just one mind you, time in history where a monopoly actually benefited anyone but stockholders in that monopoly.

I still build AMD systems exclusively and my customers are VERY happy. An AMD triple will do any job your average user wants to do with plenty of cycles left over, and the quads and hexacores tear through games like nobody's business. I'm typing this on a Thuban hexa after just blasting through some Crysis II,no lags or hangs.

So how about quitting the fanboyism and accepting that competition is GOOD and thanks to AMD I can sell $450 quad core systems and still make a nice profit.

There is one small problem with your theory.THERE IS NO 20NM YET.

Derp is all I got from that. Dude for how many years has AMD and NVidia been trading blows in GPU's? and since when does Intel know how to make a gpu? Yes intel processors are faster but graphics suck balls dude always have. Check out some benchies with piledriver in multi thread compete with ivy bridge. Yes it uses more power but still competes. Before you go ohh intel is the best amd sucks think about where amd is competing in. Think about the support amd cpu/gpus are gonna get after this. think about the competition, the price drops etc. Think about if both consoles are using 8 core x86/x64 cpus think about finally having developers learning about and implementing true multithread in games. Think about the fact that they are running X86/X64 architecture, really think about it (don't just ohh amd is sh*t so it doesn't matter). Think about how easy it will be to port games over to PC. No more skyrims and cods and gta4s and sh*t like that. Think about the fact that this chip won (apparently) both contracts (ps4 def but only rumors on 720) and its in an APU. Gotta be a half decent chip. Stop being a troll and realise this is a great step for intel/NVidia users aswell as will help unify instructions on all platforms. All gaming done on one hardware set. Thankyou AMD you have done a great job for the gaming industry. I hope this works out well for you!