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

To: steve harris who wrote (125522)	10/7/2000 8:59:46 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1579896

Steve, RE: Rambus and Infineon Not really surprised about this. I find it hard to believe that most of the major semiconductor companies don't have patents and other prior art that could invalidate the Rambus patents the way they are trying to apply them. Because if you start interpreting the Rambus patents broadly enough to cover SDRAM and DDR, then they open themselves up to this sort of stuff. The only patent that Rambus has that doesn't have to be stretched out of shape to cover SDRAM and DDR is the use of the register for "tuning" delays, and that one is questionable over the "non-obvious to those working in the field" clause in patent law.

To: steve harris who wrote (125522)	10/7/2000 2:28:18 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1579896

Rambus getting sued........ semibiznews.com "Infineon is citing pre-existing invention and art for both synchronous DRAMs and Direct RDRAM before Rambus ever applied for its patents." steve, I am not surprised. Look for more lawsuits against RMBS in the coming months. They are playing with the big guys now. ted

To: steve harris who wrote (125522)	10/8/2000 10:30:21 PM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579896

<font color=red>Celeron vs. Duron: Let’s Get It On! Want an expert opinion on the AMD Duron processor? Check out this exclusive excerpt of an article to be featured in the upcoming issue of Maximum PC magazine. Budget CPUs from Intel and AMD Go Toe-to-Toe in our Welterweight Beat-Down Budget processors — such as the Cyrix MII or Intel’s original Celeron — were once synonymous with dog-slow performance. But that was before the price of PC technology began its downward spiral. Today’s budget procs share nearly the same core architectures as their more expensive siblings, and boast clock speeds that seemed unattainable just a year ago. What the welterweights lack are large L2 cache sizes, and official support for fast memory buses—but you might be able to circumvent the latter problem if you’re willing to dabble in the dark art of overclocking. Indeed, when push comes to shove, budget CPUs are hobbyist CPUs. Buy ’em on the cheap, tweak ’em with impunity. The new Intel Celeron and AMD Duron land squarely in the redefined welterweight division. So how do they stack up against each other? First let’s take a look at their unique fighting styles, then see how they perform in the ring. Meet the Duron AMD engineers are out for blood. The Athlon processor had no trouble knocking the wind out of Intel’s Pentium III, so the folks in AMD R&D went back to the drawing board to engineer a second attack. The result is Duron, which is primed to go toe-to-toe with Intel’s low-end Celeron. AMD might have an emotional stake in taking the low-end title belt from Intel. Before Intel introduced the Celeron, AMD’s K6-2 line owned the “value” PC arena. In fact, AMD, along with Cyrix and WinChip, helped create the very sub-$1,000 PCs that pushed the prices of all computers to record lows. But when Intel introduced its second-gen Celeron, it knocked the K6-2 to the mat. And why wouldn’t it? While the second-gen Celeron shared much in common with Intel’s higher-end CPUs, the K6-2 was still an architectural throwback. Duron signals payback time. AMD simply took the basic core of its celebrated Athlon, moved it to a new 0.18-micron process, reduced its L2 cache size, and called it “budget.” Unlike the original Athlon, which had 512K of external, half-speed L2 cache, the Duron uses full-speed L2 cache integrated directly in the CPU’s die. Unfortunately, to ensure that the chip is inferior to the new Thunderbird Athlon with “performance enhancing cache,” AMD trimmed the Duron’s L2 cache to 64K (the Thunderbird boasts 256K of L2). With just 64K of L2, one might assume the Duron would be KO’ed by the Celeron, which has 128K of L2 cache. Not so, AMD says. Remember, the Athlon and its derivatives also feature 128K of L1 cache. AMD likes to note that the Duron’s combined L1 and L2 (192K) blows away the Celeron’s combined cache, which hits just 160K (Intel will finally ditch its lowly 32K L1 cache when it moves to the Pentium IV). AMD says Duron also picks up some speed because its cache is mutually exclusive, meaning data in L1 isn’t duplicated in L2. The Duron also bests the Celeron with an extra floating-point pipeline. Perhaps even more significantly, the Duron shares the Athlon’s 200 MHz EV6 memory bus. AMD says the EV6 gives the Duron three times the bus bandwidth of the Celeron’s 66 MHz bus, and is better suited for data-intensive operations, such as MP3 encoding and MPEG2 decoding. Click here to purchase the AMD Duron 750 MHz System. hsn.com You gotta love this kinda of coverage. Milo