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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Road Walker who wrote (123380)8/31/2000 2:10:35 PM
From: Petz  Read Replies (3) of 1570748
 
John, I think P4's design is a mixture of sound engineering questionable marketing and (to quote Scumbria) poor implementation:
1. The marketers said MHz at any cost
2. The engineers said, "For multimedia we need high bandwidth and latency is not as important as it used to be"
3. Then the engineers said, "We're going to need more ALU's and FPU's to process the bandwidth.

The marketeers vetoed that idea -- it would have made the die size too big. (It WAS too big already) So the engineers settled for the double-pumped integer ALU. I wouldn't blame the marketeers totally. They should have been able to do what they did in less silicon, IMHO. This thing should not be over 200 mm so something else must have gone wrong.

A poor compromise because it lowers the maximum MHz on 0.18 to only slightly above what a copper 0.18 process (AMD's) can get to. And there's not much code, multimedia or otherwise that needs loads of integer number crunching power.

A double pipe ALU and a double pipe FPU are what was really needed.

So, the tremendous bandwidth will go to waste since there's not enough guts to process the data. I suspect that will be corrected on the 0.13µ version of Willy. In fact, maybe Willy was never intended for 0.18µ anyway and the only reason its even being sort-of-produced is bragging rights with AMD.

Add a few more functional units, put it on a 0.13µ copper process and eliminate the dependency on high latency RDRAM and Willy will be formidable. How long will that take?

Petz
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