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

To: Bilow who wrote (77253)	10/26/1999 11:31:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571188

Ref- <To me, this indicates that the chip is thermally limited, certainly not voltage limited> You have an interesting point. The Athlon runs very hot. I refer a comment by Youssef about shrinking Athlon without shrinking the poly. Message 11709845 "This capacitance reduction will also be very minimal ... The lateral capacitance will go up due to closer spacing while the vertical capacitance will go down due to reduced area. These will almost "wash out" and thus will not impact performance significantly." Youssef is correct that theoretically the speed should stay unchanged. However the shrink will definitely reduce the power dissipation, making the chip run cooler at the same clock rate. A cooler chip runs faster. And since the Athlon runs hot, a slight improvement is expected. However if the Athlon is thermally limited as you suggest, the improvement may be more significant. In any case the improvement will not be the dramatic like the improvement in clock speed from Katmai to Coppermine. Remember that Intel shrank all the layers including poly, added an extra layer of metal for shorter interconnect, and used fluorinated oxide to further reduce interconnect capacitance. In Process Boy's terminology the improvement in Athlon [ without a poly shrink] should only be just one bin split at most. However AMD Process Engineers may continue to tinker with the poly gate to find ways to improve speed, and so I expect a continuos speed battle between AMD and Intel for the next six months.