[Galaxy S Advance I9070 Original Android Developmen] juanchotazo99:
I don't see how your reply has anything to do with mine, but here goes. Of course both companies do x86 the way they see fit. Too bad AMD has had horrible management the last couple of years, bleeding money like crazy. Yet they still manage to innovate from time to time on the CPU side, remember x86-64? They beat intel to the punch with that one.. so yes, let's say they depend on each other now. AMD needs intel's x86 license, intel needs AMD's 64 bits extensions to be relevant. However, it's a shame AMD can't seem to go back to the athlon glory days where they had a stronger architecture than intel's, starting from the pentium 3 up to the pentium 4's many failed iterations. If HSA software becomes commonplace in the future, then they have quite a strong point in the market. The compute potential of GCN is something to be reckoned with (nvidia really dropped the ball with consumer kepler in that regard) and I do hope their vision comes to fruition in the future. There's a reason they've gone down the road of bulldozer, lots of weak integer cores with shared resources and a comparably weak FPU per module when faced with, for example, their old Stars cores (phenom II), much less intel's nehalem and the following 4 architectures. Less execution resources that... yes! can be replaced with the brute force of GCN. They didn't buy ATI back in the day for nothing. At least the console contracts with Microsoft and Sony will keep the money flowing for the next 10 years.

Of course we can't compare Intel's manufacturing prowess and AMD's (globalfoundries' to be more exact) to mobile players that depend on TSMC's manufacturing. Yet intel is inching x86 every day closer to ARM's stronghold thanks to their superior foundries (14nm around the corner whereas TSMC's stuck at 20nm density with finfets in the future, calling it "16nm") and lately, a better effort in the form of silvermont atoms which completely destroy their first generation half-assed atoms. They only need to be pervasive.. but that's going to be difficult, ARM's dominance of the mobile space is something that can't be battled.. but then if you're intel then it might be possible one day.

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Offtopic aside, considering that TSMC and many other foundries do the manufacturing for design houses like our dead STE and many others, their 45nm process wasn't so bad (if it were then they wouldn't be around), I just meant that STE may very well had decided to use a lower power version of it rather than a high performance version tuned for pure frequency (or even a cheaper, watered down process), and therefore undervolting for our phone may prove to be more fruitful than overclocking (or maybe the U8500 is based on some of the first cortex A9 revisions which didn't clock as well as the later ones). It is something to be tested when it is easier to do so (For example, a voltage table that maps to what registers we have to set in order to get such voltage, etc.) and from there see what the U8500 is capable of, in general, in terms of frequency/voltage.

I still wouldn't hold my breath over it because it was never posed to be a high end solution to take over samsung's exynos 4210 and other premium SOCs back in the day.