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

To: Charles R who wrote (86716)	1/12/2000 2:18:00 PM
From: Greater Fool	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1588057

Good points. I think 20% per year is a bit high, but I don't have statistics to back myself up. Anyone? Increasing die size doesn't help unless revenues are increased to cover the opportunity cost. AMD hasn't had much luck in this regard (witness the K6-III debacle), but the situation will be somewhat different with the Athlon derivatives you mention. When die size is increased to included L2 cache, a very expensive logic process is used to make SRAMs, which though not exactly cheap, are not the high margin product one hopes for in microprocessors.

To: Charles R who wrote (86716)	1/12/2000 2:23:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1588057

Chuck, <So, I don't quite see a flood of excess capacity.> Don't forget that in the not-too-distant future, 300mm "economy-sized" wafers will go into mass production. Combine those Pizza Hut wafers with a 0.13u process and you can imagine how quickly the manufacturing capacity can grow. Maybe by then, we'll be integrating multi-megabyte caches onto the lowest of low-end processors, not to mention the entire chipset, graphics controller, and everything else but the kitchen sink. Tenchusatsu