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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Scumbria who wrote (114071)6/4/2000 5:02:00 PM
From: EricRR  Read Replies (1) of 1577191
 

Message #114072 from Scumbria at Jun 4, 2000 8:41 AM ET
Joe,

933MHz has thermal problems

In other words, like the 1GHz PIII's, the 933 MHz PIII's are not functional at temperature. More indication that Intel is seriously overclocking their parts, in a desperate attempt to keep up with AMD.

From the availability in the stores, it is very clear that PIII's natural yield point is below 750MHz. Whatever improvements that Intel has made in their current production, will not be able to keep up with manufacturing from Dresden.

I expect Intel to remain at least 5 speed grades behind AMD until Willy.


Why though are you so sure that Willy is going to work "well" at all? This is not idiotic wishful thinking by an AMD long on my part, but a serious question.

Intel has well known thermal problems with Coppermine at 1GHz, and also apparently at 933MHz. These thermal problems are the result of notched gates having a lower temperature tolerance than was expected. Why should increased pipelining nessesarily fix this problem?

I always thought that there were two separate hurdles to increasing the frequency of a chip:

1)Making sure that logic can complete in the alotted clock cycle. (solution- increase pipelining or shrink circuit)

2)Making sure that the chip can tolerate/conduct away the heat it produces. (solution- improve process technology, design chip to prevent hot spots)

I realize that to some extent these two issue are mutually dependent, but I don't understand how Intel can make such a huge frequency leap in from P3 to Willy without some kind of process leap?

(Intel put forward the "notched gates" technique as a process leap, but it apparently isn't working as well as expected. Perhaps the design of Willy incorporated the same erroneous assumptions about temperature tolerances of the gates?)
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