Mark, thank you for your message and references to Mr. PE's messages, which are very informative.
To my knowledge, AMD is pretty good at manufacturing so I would imagine that AMD should not have too much difficulty moving over to 0.25u process. I could be totally wrong, however.
On the other hand, the CPU speed increase has slowed down significantly. For example, Pentium Pro is only marginally faster than Pentium. It looks like that the curve for CPU speed increase is getting flatter. Therefore, I wonder how much advantage Intel can get by moving to some faster but much more expensive cup's.
On the other hand, as suggested by PE's posts, the bottleneck seems to the speed of the external bus. However, ramping up external bus speed involves not only better chip sets but also faster memory devices. So in my mind, the key for PC performance improvement down the road is no longer CPU but external bus which consists of chip sets and new memory design. This situation should work to the advantage of AMD because it is not the leader in CPU development. I believe that the exsting K5 and coming K6 will be around for a relatively long period of time. I said that based on my personal experience. I have been using an AMD 486 133HZ for some very heavy duty applications. It performed quite satifactorily. Recently, I moved up to a K5pr133 and although it is definitely faster, the difference is not that significant. As we are moving to k6, the difference between k6 and newer cpu's from intel will probably smaller.
Again, just my two cents worth. |
