Dan, Re: "Intel is putting up a brave face, claiming that Athlon is really a .13 chip now (at the same time they trumpet beating AMD to .13 - they should pick a story and stick to it)"
Let's get one thing straight. So far, Intel has not claimed anything about AMD's gate lengths. As a corporation, they are sticking to the message that they are first to .13u and are now in high volume production. It is the Intel investors on this thread that have picked up on AMD using 70nm gate lengths (which, again, is a .13u feature, not .13u). If your article is true, and the Pentium 4 was seen as using 90nm gate lengths, that is still almost 30% larger than what AMD is using, meaning that there is a lot of headroom left to go.
Either way, if you look at AMD's roadmap, it is clear that the K7 is expected to get very little in the way of progress by using .13u SOI. Their model 2600+ using their current trend suggests a 2.06GHz part. That is hardly that much better than the 1.6GHz .18u part available today, and if you take the roadmap even more seriously, you'd see a 1.8GHz .18u part as well. That means going from .18u Cu to .13u Cu/SOI gained them 266MHz. I figured that being the kind of person you are, that you would have already over-analyzed these facts. Maybe the thing is that you'd rather ignore the negatives, and concentrate on over-analyzing for signs of something positive.
wanna_bmw |
