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

To: kash johal who wrote (81338)	11/29/1999 1:16:00 AM
From: Process Boy	Respond to of 1573018

kash - <Lets wait and see - not too long to wait.> I have a much different take than you. I guess we will have to. I do believe AMD's bin splits have improved quite a bit over the last couple of months. I can't comment on your Intel estimates. I will say that as a proces guy though, I am not discouraged by the result Intel is achieving. BTW, I think Intel's .18 interconnect process also performs extremely well. The coupling of high aspect ratio metalization with a Low-k (F doped) dielectric has demonstrated to be quite effective at reducing in-plane and out of plane capacitance. If Intel has crappy interconnects, it wouldnt be able to run the upcoming SpeedStep devices with reduced power at such high MHz. In lieu of SpeedStep devices (which are coming very soon), the Cumine power matrix is still quite impressive. Sorry to be so nitpicky. :-). The flip side to AMD's process performance vs. Intel, is that they may have more room to improve. This is not a criticism. It's that old "potential" thing again. I.e., AMD has "the opportunity" to break out relative to xtor and process performance. I have no prediction if they will actually do this or not, with the metric being what I know about the two respective processes / performance. Just saying the potential is there, by virtue of being #2 in this category. As for you comment about "routing and design", Athlon would have the advantage here. Athlon speed path chasing down activities are at the beginning of the curve vs. the Cumine core. Cumine was totally re-layed out for .18, (a very optimized shrink from .25) which gives Intel designers a little more of the Bell curve to work with. PB