Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices Message Board

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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: JBoyd who wrote (34307)	7/11/1998 7:15:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) of 1572229

Re: "K-6 design. You indicated that it was a great design, but they were overly aggressive in implementation. Yousef made the same point and says AMD is two to three years behind Intel in process technology. Is process technology basically manufacturing or is it design? I'm really struggling to understand this aspect of the business. " It's manufacturing but a process has to be developed first by people like Yousef before it is turned over to manufacturing as being production ready. A product is the marrage of a design and a manufacturing process. The designers are given a set of constraints called design rules which define the reasonable limits of the process. Paul or Yousef can do a much better job than I describing them but a few are transistor channel lengths, metal line spacing, oxide thicknesses etc etc. Libraries of cells made up of such things as flipflops, latches, gates, muxes, inverters etc. are used by design to turn their logical design into a real circuit. All cells are designed based on the design rules defined by the process developers. The rules are defined to achieve the best combination of performance, yield, die area, throughput time etc. Any one of these rules can be optimized at the expense of another. Die size can be minimized at the expense of yield and throughput time, an example would be AMD's decision to use local interconnects although I don't know as a fact that this is the cause of their major yield problems. It is the concensus of many here that AMD simply tried to optimize too many process factors and the whole thing came falling down like a house of cards. Their design was implimented with a set of design rules that was simply too aggressive for their process capabilities. Their design rules were never proven in high volume manufacturing because they never had a high volume part on .35u. They couldn't get high speed AND high yield on minimul die area all at the same time. I don't believe any technically competent person would have made such a high risk decision. Jerry said he was betting the farm (yours and mine, certainly not Jerrys farm) on the K6. He's the one who had the final say of pushing things to the breaking point. He was undoubtedly warned of the risks but his goal was and is to fight Intel to the last cent he can beg borrow or otherwise con out of investors. Too bad his goal never was to enhance shareholder value. As for holding this stock, I'm still holding mine but really only as a hedge. My cost is ~$18. Why not sell some covered calls? EP

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