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

To: kash johal who wrote (90727)	1/31/2000 9:26:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575341

Ref- < I recall all the SOS BS from HP many years ago. Maybe SOI isn't that new!!!! > You are right that SOI is pretty old. And it used to be called SOS.[ Silicon on Sapphire].It even predates the work at HP. It began at RCA Labs in late 1960's. RCA would not pursue it, so several people left RCA and formed a company to pursue it. After several years and tons of money, this company went belly up. [ The name of the company escapes me now ]. This company never solved the yield problems with SOS. Then HP labs spent several years pursuing it, and after pouring tons of money gave-up on it in early 1980's. So Intel picked up the mantle, but within 2 years dumped the technology too. Now IBM has taken on the challenge. IBM has the best technology, and it appears to have licked the problems which plagued everyone else. However the IBM results disclosed at IEDM 99, did not show a dramatic performance improvement over the Intel Coppermine process. And IBM does not always have the most cost effective chip technology. For mainframes, the chip cost is not an issue. The last bit of performance means a lot. So IBM and Intel have a different outlook since they serve different market needs. Same goes for Copper interconnects too. Given the sorry history of SOI, the old moniker SOS ( Save our Souls) was more appropriate. Regards

To: kash johal who wrote (90727)	1/31/2000 9:38:00 PM
From: Hans de Vries	Respond to of 1575341

Kash: <If Intel could yield SOI with a 5% yield loss but get the 25% speed ramp they would do so in a FLASH.> These are your words and exactly my opinion Kash! But I was just quoting, leaving the inevitable conclusion to the reader.... It has more to do with the copy-exact strategy I guess. (All or Nothing: If something goes wrong then everything goes wrong, Like going to DRDRAM without an SDRAM backup strategy ready) This reaction looks a lot like the reaction on copper for lots of the same reasons. AMD has the chance to play a little wait and see with Motorola first.... <<Ooops I recall all the SOS BS from HP many years ago. Maybe SOI isn't that new!!!!>> Yes, SOI is around for about 30 years. But then electric copper wires are around for over 150 years... I would not expect any SOI Athlon before 2001. If Willy can execute programs 25% faster by more than doubling the die size. Great! but it would give a 25% faster SOI Athlon some relief on the yield issue don't you think? :^) Hans.