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

To: tejek who wrote (99551)	3/23/2000 3:02:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571063

ted, re:<Intel is disabling half of the cache and likely running it at a slower speed, so the chip can only take advantage of 128KB of the cache.> A while back I proposed a theory that Intel's CuMines suffer from the same yield problem as AMD's K6-3. Namely, that too much leakage, especially in the cache transistors, resulted in excess noise, which meant that switching speeds had to be reduced. (The K6-3 never got above 450 MHz and the vast majority only made it to 400 MHz. Also, it used a 2.4v power supply vs. 2.2v for the K6-2. Higher voltage=more noise immunity.) The notched gate on the CuMine may increase the leakage current. Others have already reported that, for example, current consumption of the CuMine in its "power-saving" modes is much larger than the 0.25 non-notched PeeWeeIII. Some current saving modes do not even work. So cutting the power to half the cache could reduce the noise and allow the CuMine 128K to run faster than the 256K version. If these Celeron III's, or whatever they'll be called, overclock a lot better than the CuMine, it may confirm the theory outlined above. I'm going to ask WATSONYOUTH to comment on this, since he seems to be an expert on the device physics and notched gate used by Intel on CuMine. Petz