Intel is essentially still using the Pentium II architecture, where AMD has refreshed theirs recently with the bulldozer. Intel's fab advantage (32->22nm gives

Intel is essentially still using the Pentium II architecture, where AMD has refreshed theirs recently with the bulldozer. Intel's fab advantage (32->22nm gives a massive thermal advantage) is getting wasted on putting more GPU on die. Probably because they can't put more cores on there without blowing their thermal threshold. The only way to add more cores then, is for cores to share more component: share the sequencer (more vector instructions), share the FP pipeline (aka bulldozer module), etc. Running bulldozer modules on a 22nm fab would definitely beat the Intel Xeons on the majority of the server applications. Increasing the cache sizes and increasing the set associativity (amd is at 4, Intel at 8) will already give it the edge. With regard to the sharing of FP pipelines: this is not new, the Sun Sparks have been doing that for ages. As we add more cores and parallelism, we will go more towards finer-grained parallel architectures like the spark. The bulldozer is only a shy step in that direction, not willing to commit too much in loss of sequential performance.