First, good job Shifty on trying to keep this thread in order, always appreciated!
Secondly, I also (like someone else mentioned) is in awe of people who knows maths at high level, those people are admired by me
Thirdly, and post related...
I don´t what to negate all the interesting perspectives we have gotten from astrograd or gipsel or other.. but perhaps we should look at the Occams razor answer here?
What is the simplest explanation on how MS got the "bumped" up performance of the ESRAM?
So question would be, who/what/which design/produced ESRAM for MS?
Can it be something along the lines of.. MS tech-guys thought they would get x performance but AMD (or whoever the partner was) knew that they could do more with it and made the changes when giving samples back to MS and while testing, they found out that they had more performance than x?
(Ok, this is perhaps not the Occams razor answer, but somewhere, the "surprised" comments have to be explained. Or, it is just that the DF used bad wording and that MS was really not surprised but they did made a change on samples that they hoped for would give them more speed and samples came back positive..)
I remember Phil Spencer saying that MS went in and customized the tiniest piece of silicon in the machine to optimize performance..
anyways, fascinating thread!