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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (96245)	3/2/2000 3:13:00 PM
From: Epinephrine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573096

RE: <You want to argue with 50 Watts, Petz?> Paul, You have repeatedly posted concerns over Athlon's power requirements. Please consider that Athlon's core is meant to be their competitive base for years to come. If they were to sacrifice speed in favor of lower power now then that could very well become a liability later. Instead AMD chose to design the core for maximum performance even where that meant that doing so would require larger power requirements. I believe that they did this even to the point of making the power requirements almost excessively high in the first generation because they knew that they would only be on a .25 micron process for an extremely short time after release and that .18 would reduce those slightly excessive power requirements below a threshold that would be considered more reasonable. If I am right then they executed on this strategy flawlessly and they did indeed reduce the power requirements once already. AMD now has several more power requirement reductions to look forward to, one after the other just like clockwork (assuming that they execute) owing to: - Copper - .13 process - .10 process - Various architectural tweaks and improvements In my opinion AMD did a superb job in specing out and balancing the power/performance tradeoffs in the Athlon. I think that the Athlon core will serve them well for years and this is in a large part due to the fact that they did a superb job of designing Athlon's core with a broad and balanced perspective towards long term viability. To limit Athlon's power now and then be stuck several years later after tweaks and process enhancements with a low power but also relatively low performance core would have been shortsighted. My claim is that Athlon is a balanced design and that it's high power requirements today are a result of the fact that Athlon was designed not just with today in mind but also tomorrow and those high power requirements are an architectural advantage that will be borne out as AMD continues to migrate to smaller processes generations and tweaks the core itself. I rely heavily on this thread to help me maintain objectivity, so please Paul and all those who disagree with me. Tear my claims apart and show me where they are wrong. Thanks, Epinephrine