SOI is a layer on a wafer buried under a silicon crystal layer. The processing steps are the same for either bulk or SOI, once the SOI wafer is made. Thus by substituting a SOI wafer for a bulk one, a 30% gain in speed. Using Athlon with its low price vs speed slope, would get $31 going from a 1G to a 1.3G Tbird using today's prices. At 200 good die per wafer, the allowed cost increase would be $6K a wafer or $8K SOI vs $2K bulk. That is far greater than the expected cost increases of SOI wafers.
What do you think a 1.5G Palomino MP, using no more power than a current 1.2G one, would get for an ASP? Probably around $400-500. SOI is a no brainer at a 30% speed increase at same power. Intel is just trying to talk down SOI because they would not be ready to go to it until the 0.10u process because of copy exact.
Pete,
You have a lot of misinformation there, and show a lot of misunderstanding about SOI in general. You can create an SOI wafer using a deep, high energy, oxygen implant. This creates very BAD SOI wafers with tons of yield fallout because of damage to the Si crystal over the oxide layer. Given the type of process reliability numbers quoted in the article detailing the Power4 chip, I find it highly unlikely that IBM would go that route to create their SOI. This means they must purchase or manufacture SOI wafers using one of the other methods in the literature. These create very high quality SOI wafers, but the wafer cost is 3X to 4X a normal EPI wafer which would reasonably add $400-$500 to the per wafer cost of the process.
If you honestly think that AMD is going to be able to price their CPU's at $400-500 any time soon, I don't think we have any more to talk about. I think you're engaging in a bit of hyperbole at this point... AMD can't command even $200 for a processor which allegedly (and debatably) outperforms Intel's best.
Would you care to explain why how you arrive at the conclusion "Intel is just trying to talk down SOI because they would not be ready to go to it until the 0.10u process because of copy exact." You use a lot of buzzwords there, but you don't make a case. If you can demonstrate some logic there, I will take time to respond to it. |
