AMD Q1 2013 earnings: revenue down 31% YoY

[zarx]

Soleron said:

zarx said:

...

And before anyone asks an ARM Cortex-A15 based CPU is pretty comparable to Jaguar in terms of features, but much more power effeciant. And I dare say an 8 core A15 CPU at 2.5GHz (The highest reference spec) would probably outperform an 8 core 1.6/2Ghz Jaguar based one by a large margin. Plus the nature of the ARM licensing means that they are cheap and highly customisable.

False, or at least you can't just say that. No one's isolated the power of just an A15 core vs just a Jaguar core on the same workload yet.

An 8-core A15 would not outperform this because i) it's not 64-bit and ii) ARM memory bandwidth is very low, and iii) and this is important, it DOESN'T EXIST. If you want it to, it will take 2 years to come to market (not kidding) by which time AMD may well have something better.

I don't get the 2 years to come to market comment, the Cortex-A15 has been available to license since 2011 and there are devices on the market right now unlike Jaguar. I had fogotten that it was still 32bit address space per thread and that could be a slight issue, but it's got 40-bit physical address space so 8GB of RAm isn't an issue. For memory performance some modifications would of course have to be made, Sony had to make modifications to the memory system for the PS4 anyway. They have made larg strides in memory performance since A9. The area where Jaguar really wins is SIMD but Cortex A15 isn't the shitshow that A9 was in that are ether. 

We will have to wait until some actual Jaguar based devices get out there so they can be compared. Closes thing I could find is this that uses Bobcat 

Samsung Chromebook Performance Comparison
	SunSpider 0.9.1	BrowserMark	RIABench Focus Tests	Kraken
Atom N570 1.66GHz	1034.3 ms	152780	1968 ms	14229.5 ms
Exynos 5 Dual 1.7GHz	690.5 ms	217031	1192 ms	9733.2 ms

Which is pretty worthless