Jim, Re: "Interesting that Intel had to spend mucho dollars ramping the p-iii to .13u just for notebooks, x-box and a few server chips. Basically says the P4 core just ain't ready."
You're right. Pentium 4 is not ready for any of the above markets. I think in this day and age, the single chip solution has its drawbacks. It become more difficult to be as power conscious as you are performance capable. In Intel's case, they made the Pentium 4 their flagship CPU performer, but didn't take power consumption into the equation as much. Meanwhile, the Pentium III, while no longer a great performer, does have a lot of advantages when voltage scaled to lower power points. Thus it simply makes sense for Intel to have the best of both worlds. And even when Pentium 4 makes it to smaller manufacturing processes, Intel still intends to differentiate themselves with different processor lines, such as Banias.
AMD does not have the luxury of two processor designs right now, so they have set themselves to take advantage of SOI to get better performance and lower power consumption. However, I think in the future, it will begin to make more sense to have separate designs to fit the demand of different market segments. AMD's K8 may be the last great single chip top-to-bottom solution. After that, it may be hard to promote a chip-of-all-trades.
wanna_bmw |
