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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jcholewa who wrote (5217)	8/16/2000 12:17:24 PM
From: pgerassi	Respond to of 275872

Dear JC: Re: Double Clocked ALU The reason they will drop it, IMHO, is that by dropping it, they can increase the sweet spot of the P4 much higher than the losses incurred by the slight latency and IPC increase. This is the tradeoff that occurred by them putting it in. IMHO, a double clocked ALU sounds nice as a "Gee Whiz" feature, but it causes many subsidary effects like increased complexity of control, decreased ability to balance the stages in the pipe, and a probably becoming the upper bound on clock rates (the way this is implemented sounds like it adds more transistor delays as the tradeoff to higher throughput). The first two reasons might be worked around, but the last would be a killer. It is the last one that is the reason both Scumbria and myself believe is a tradeoff not worth making. Pete