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

To: Scumbria who wrote (114071)	6/4/2000 3:10:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1587854

Scumbria, this brings up another round of, er, inscrutable posturing by Intel. So, Willy is going to be both the high-end and mid-range saviour, e.g. totally replacing the cumine line real soon now. Sometimes allegedly even by the y2k peak selling season, which would seem to imply production Willy wafer starts real, real soon now, like in a couple months. But Willy has a 60% bigger die that cumine? And Intel can't produce enough cumines for demand? Meanwhile, from the CNET die size article, yahoo.cnet.com "Don't be myopic about the first die size and product," Glavin cautioned investors. "You throw out the first one. It's like making pancakes." It's not unusual for Intel to debut a processor at a large size, waiting for the next generation of thinner wiring to allow the chip to shrink to a less costly size. Intel is expected to move sometime next year to a 0.13-micron process, from today's 0.18 micron manufacturing line. The numbers refer to the size of components on the chip. "They will aggressively shrink that die," said MicroDesign Resources analyst Kieth Diefendorff. "It's going to spend most of its life at 0.13 micron." Funny thing, I searched for Diefendorff here, recalling some extreme Intel suckup comments from him, and found Tenchusatsu whining about Intel being treated unfairly in the press, go figure. So, Intel's going to kill AMD with a throwaway processor, available in massive quantity real soon now, and then seamlessly transition onto the .13 um process, which will present no problems, it's clear, given how smoothly the .18 um transition went. And this is without even getting into the Rambus/chipset issue. I'm sure Intel will get it together sometime, but the current plan seems to call for them to pull about 5 rabbits out of the hat simultaneously. Flawless execution is one thing, flawless execution of this plan would seem to require the reincarnation of Anne Sullivan. Cheers, Dan.

To: Scumbria who wrote (114071)	6/4/2000 5:02:00 PM
From: EricRR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1587854

Message #114072 from Scumbria at Jun 4, 2000 8:41 AM ET Joe, 933MHz has thermal problems In other words, like the 1GHz PIII's, the 933 MHz PIII's are not functional at temperature. More indication that Intel is seriously overclocking their parts, in a desperate attempt to keep up with AMD. From the availability in the stores, it is very clear that PIII's natural yield point is below 750MHz. Whatever improvements that Intel has made in their current production, will not be able to keep up with manufacturing from Dresden. I expect Intel to remain at least 5 speed grades behind AMD until Willy. Why though are you so sure that Willy is going to work "well" at all? This is not idiotic wishful thinking by an AMD long on my part, but a serious question. Intel has well known thermal problems with Coppermine at 1GHz, and also apparently at 933MHz. These thermal problems are the result of notched gates having a lower temperature tolerance than was expected. Why should increased pipelining nessesarily fix this problem? I always thought that there were two separate hurdles to increasing the frequency of a chip: 1)Making sure that logic can complete in the alotted clock cycle. (solution- increase pipelining or shrink circuit) 2)Making sure that the chip can tolerate/conduct away the heat it produces. (solution- improve process technology, design chip to prevent hot spots) I realize that to some extent these two issue are mutually dependent, but I don't understand how Intel can make such a huge frequency leap in from P3 to Willy without some kind of process leap? (Intel put forward the "notched gates" technique as a process leap, but it apparently isn't working as well as expected. Perhaps the design of Willy incorporated the same erroneous assumptions about temperature tolerances of the gates?)