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

To: ericneu who wrote (84298)	12/29/1999 2:33:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572719

Eric, I agree with you there. With millions of transistors there will be errors. The error hunt can start early on in the chip design libraries. Eliminate these early errors and they do not reach the final stage masks. AMD might have better tools than Intel. Intel might be house-tool bound and AMD selects the best tools on the open market? Then test exhaustively in emulation, with an emulator that has fewer errors and finally make a part, test that to death, fix all you find and test some more. Ideally there is a large degree of parralellism so it can proceed rapidly. If what Petz says and Elmer concurs with is true then AMD simply does a better job than Intel, with whatever tools are used. I remember with the 386 and 486 parts. The AMD parts were invariably cheaper and better than Intel ones. Of course this Athlon project is a new design, while the intel P-III is an evolutionary design from the predecessors and intel may have some chaotic interactions that make it nearly impossible to get the errata below a certain level. the fix 20 errors and introduce 24 new ones. NT4 had that problem with the service packs. As this unfolds I see that Intel is starting to look like it has become a dinosaur style of company. Too much overhead and beurocracy to react quickly and effectively. Micro managed? Bill