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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kash johal who wrote (73431)	9/29/1999 1:09:00 PM
From: Elmer	Respond to of 1573532

Re: "Boy you shure are desperate with the fud. Seems to me your BSB needs some testing too." Kash, in your daze and confusion you continue to either imagine things or completely miss what was posted. With ondie cache these is no BSB. That was the whole point. Re: "The Athlon die are NOT tested at speed on wafer form." Who said they were? Re: "The speed testing is done with the cache on the module." Not likely there alone but if they do it's a poor choice. Any delay fault in the BSB i/o buffers would require scrapping the entire cartridge along with the SRAMs. In addition, without prior speed testing they would have to match all processors with the fastest SRAMs before final test, an expensive and foolish strategy. Re: "As far as guardbanding VCC etc. The devices are tested to ensure they meet the specs for each speed grade. So for a 2.0V device the spec for min amd max may be 1.9V to 2.1V. The tester will test to 1.8V to 2.15V there is NO need for 5-10% margins just what is adequate for the tester capability." There would be no need for further guardbanding if you only want the part to meet the specs for a short time but hot electrons cause a performance degradeation that must be taken into account. That's why the extra guardband. We were discussing an alternative for that extra guardband, not the need for it. Re: "If the spec is 500Mhz, they may test at 505Mhz as min to ensure tester accuracy doesnot come into product binning, but no way are 500Mhz parts really 550Mhz parts." Maybe where you work this is true, but I sure wouldn't want to buy product from your company. I can assure you that your major competition doesn't cut corners on long term reliability like you do. Re: "And finally the test time on the CPU market is largely irrelevant. The cost of 100UPH or 2500UPH is basically a dollar or two." This mentality shows you have never had to face huge demand. The point is that if your test time to too high you have to buy more testers to meet demand and maybe build more facilities. For a company near bankruptcy, would you want to have to shell out many many millions of $$$$ just because you don't have the test capacity? And that assumes the testers are available. You can't call up your favorite tester company and ask for 20 more of the ultra high speed testers by next tuesday. All this because your test time is too high because you can't do on-die L2 because your defect density is too high. Please stop accusing me of posting BS when it is clear you have some good knowledge but aren't totally up on the topic. You just want to keep up these nonsense accusations. Give it a rest will you? EP