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

To: Scumbria who wrote (11260)	10/3/2000 7:19:20 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

The original 604 microarchitecture, which is the basis for all the later PowerPC's, was built on the fundamental principle of a short pipeline and high IPC. This is the same philosophy that killed Cyrix. Their counterparts at DEC figured out the right way to design microprocessors (deep pipeline) and the smart folks at AMD and Intel picked up on it later. It takes about 5 seconds worth of analysis to figure out that the G4 pipe is much too short to scale to high frequency. What on earth are they thinking of? Well, I certainly agree with everything you said. In your original post, however, you said "The problem with G4 isn't the architecture". I guess I take the pipeline length to be a key part of the architecture while you are calling it a microarchitectural feature. Whatever. I think we are on the same wavelength. I hear that IBM might be considering a single core version of the Power4 for Apple. They would add the SIMD instructions and go with perhaps 512K L2 cache. I believe it is a 15 stage pipeline and should easily scale beyond 1GHz. Of course, by the time IBM gets done with Power4 and moves resources to the Apple design, Apple may have all ready abandoned PPC. IBM strategy simply goes over my head. They go out of their way to provide Nintendo with a processor they probably get $25 for and they literally abandon Apple whose processors probably average $175. I guess they don't teach them common sense in PHD school. THE WATSONYOUTH