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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Harry K. Ahn who wrote (3393)11/30/1996 12:50:00 AM
From: Maxwell   of 1579039
 
When you go to 5 metal layers from 3, you can compactify the chip and
also increase its speed. Why? First, when you go to more metal layers, your wire routing PER METAL LAYER can be simpler. Thus all the neighbor transistors can be closer together and the die size can be smaller. Second, the wiring PER METAL LAYER can be further apart. This reduces the capacitance between the wires and thus you can go to higher speed. These two reasons explain why the die size of K6, even though it has more than TWICE the # of transistors than K5, is smaller than K5. The other factor that contributes to smaller die size significantly is that the technology similar to BGA for bonding pads is used in K6.

Intel will eventually switch to 5 metal layers. They realize it is the easiest way of achieving high speed. It is probably the 4 metal layers of their design that limits their devices beyond 233MHz. At
5 metal layers, achieving 500MHz is possible if the design is right.

The thing that fascinates me about the K6 is the 64K cache. That is spectacular! The more cache the merrier. It is the L1 cache that helps the performance of the processor. It outperforms Pentium Pro, yet running COOL! I have a feeling that AMD has the winning design processor. If they can come out on time and market it right, AMD will give Intel a run for their money. Then Intel stock would drop and all those Damn Intel Idiot Investors can shut their mouth.
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