[offtopic]
Erinyes said:
My personal speculation for the next Xbox is an AMD fusion chip, with say 12-16 Bulldozer cores(Steamroller/Excavator) and a Tahiti class GPU (under 22/20nm in say late 2014). Of course this is all a completely made up and random thought
Wrong choice given Bulldozer horrible performance, A smaller CPU with higher IPC would be a much better option.
He is not talking about current year 2011 bulldozer, but much later, much different core.
Current bulldozer has problems. None of the big problems are "fundamental" things that cannot be fixed without major design. It just needs better caches and some minor tweaks (to get better ipc), more mature manufacturing technology and optimizing some speed paths(to get clock speed up and power consumption down).
And no, smaller cpu with higher IPC does not make sense if clock speeds would be much slower
or operating voltages much higher.
Bulldozer tries to balance IPC and clock speed, but unfortunately the current first implementation failed on both.
However, such implementation failures on chip with shorter pipeline would have just resulted in even worse performance, as clock speeds would have been much slower.
There's faster, cheaper and more efficient chips out there so why use Bulldozer?
1) You don't understand the difference between chip and core.
2) There are not faster, cheaper and more efficient chips out there than those amd cores that are coming after 2.5 years.
3) Intel will soon come out with faster, more efficient CORES than those AMD cores that are coming after 2.5 years, but
a) you cannot get those with a decent integrated GPU.
b) those will cost more.