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

To: Ali Chen who wrote (82688)	12/12/1999 12:43:00 AM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 1572274

Ref-"<I think that design tweaks on the logic circuitry will also give a significant speed enhancements > The main Pentium-Pro core pipeline has been in design revisions for many years. You seem to think that there are many opportunities left. "Significant". " Intel has historically continued to tweak the chip layout after first production begins and gain an extra 7-15% benefit without any architectural or significant change in the logic. This has taken an army of test and design engineers carefully evaluating all the speed paths, and then tweaking the layout and circuit design. Intel has always had an army of circuit designers fine tuning the layout of the x86 design. During the last decade the RISC processors were supposed to deliver 2x the performance of the x86. In practice this theoretical advantage did not materialize, because X86 absorbed some of the RISC concepts, and Intel threw in an army of engineers to fine tune the layout and process. The fine tuning and optimization reduced the performance gap with RISC further, and other foundry based x86 manufacturers could not afford the army of engineers, and have faded away. The present Coppermine being shipped is a minor tweak of the first silicon. And Coppermine was a brand new layout. Thus the potential for significant gain(10% clock rate) clearly exists. I know that any potential improvement by Intel will be considered vaporware, by you and this thread. But remember that Intel has been playing its cards close to its chest, and has already come up with several surprises on the Coppermine. I am reasonably certain that by the middle of next year Intel will be shipping a 1GHz Coppermine. However I not certain if AMD or Intel will get there first. AMD has announced its intentions, and may also have some surprises up its sleeve.