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

To: Greater Fool who wrote (85927)	1/7/2000 7:43:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572372

RE:"Makes one wonder why AMD jumped so vigorously into doing a carded Athlon"... They had to because they haven't put the L2 cache on the chip die yet. That's the tricky part. They took the low road...because 1. to wait to put the L2 in die would have delayed the Athlon and 2. the already large 184mm2 .25u Athon die would have been made much larger with the addition of L2. Now that the Athlon has shrunk to .18u it's much more feasible to get decent yields if the L2 is on die. So they are working on it. Jim

To: Greater Fool who wrote (85927)	1/7/2000 7:59:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572372

Re: "maybe it was the difficulty of doing an on-chip L2; maybe it was the current consumption of Athlon." Those were the exact reasons why Intel did the slot1 in the first place and I think you are right about Athlon doing it for the same reasons. Intel doesn't need it anymore but Athlon still does. EP

To: Greater Fool who wrote (85927)	1/7/2000 8:49:00 PM
From: Y. Samuel Arai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572372

>Makes one wonder why AMD jumped so vigorously into doing a >carded Athlon. It screams "me too". Now they have to >develop yet another infrastructure for socketed Athlon. >I'm pretty sure there was some good reason for doing that >at the time -- maybe it was the difficulty of doing an on- >chip L2; maybe it was the current consumption of Athlon. Slot-A existed before the Athlon. They use Slot-A with the DEC (Compaq) Alpha CPUs. AMD figured it would be better to go with an existing slot design, than to create one from scratch.

To: Greater Fool who wrote (85927)	1/8/2000 12:14:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572372

Greater, <jumped so vigorously into doing a carded Athlon. It screams "me too".> "me too"? What that suppose to mean? Please explain.

To: Greater Fool who wrote (85927)	1/8/2000 3:05:00 AM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1572372

GF, re:<Makes one wonder why AMD jumped so vigorously into doing a carded Athlon. It screams "me too". Now they have to develop yet another infrastructure for socketed Athlon. I'm pretty sure there was some good reason for doing that at the time -- maybe it was the difficulty of doing an on-chip L2; maybe it was the current consumption of Athlon.> I'm sure there was a lot of debate within AMD about whether to wait for 0.18u process to do the Athlon with on-die cache rather than start with the 0.25u process. Clearly, they made the right decision. If AMD had waited for 0.18 before launching Athlon and Intel did not have the Coppermine delay, AMD would be in chapter 11 or sold for peanuts to Motorola. Even with the Coppermine delay, AMD would be on its last legs. So your first guess, <maybe it was the difficulty of doing an on-chip L2> was the correct one. Petz