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

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (33591)	3/27/2001 1:34:31 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Watson, Intel is stockpiling 5GHz P4's right now. They can't find a crystal fast enough to drive it, so they are piling up on AG's desk. When they switch over to 0.13u, it will easily hit a THz, and the die size will be smaller than the head of a pin. Scumbria

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (33591)	3/27/2001 2:08:33 AM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

I don't think that is likely do you? I think AMD is closer to 130nm then INTC. M.

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (33591)	3/27/2001 2:09:29 AM
From: Harvey Allen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

W.Y.- Are they using a MTH again on the P4 SDRAM chip sets? Harvey

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (33591)	3/27/2001 8:45:51 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: Maybe T bird is only good to 1.4GHZ and Palomino only reaches 1.7GHz at .18um. Then P4 at .13um will blow it away if they get there in volume say 6-9 months ahead of AMD. Availability of Intel's .13 will be limited for most of the first year of production. The one part they have that is somewhat competitive even on .18 is P4. Were Intel to focus their limited .13 resources on P4, AMD would have a field day selling into the midrange and mobile markets, since its Dresden .18 process and/or its core designs have been more successful than Intel's. I write and/or because Austin vs. Intel is a battle Intel would win, while Dresden vs. Intel has been a loser for Intel, so far. Some sources claim Intel's .18 is more like .15 if compared to output from the older AMD lines at Austin - in which case a lot of credit has to go to the core, which has kept Austin competitive with PIII. But it's pretty clear that the main success for AMD has come from the advanced copper .18 process at Dresden (which Intel swore was irrelevant for .18, just as they are now claiming SOI is irrelevant). If Intel were to suddenly have vast amounts of .13 production running with copper interconnect, it could put a lot of pressure on AMD until the .13/copper/SOI AMD process is on line. How likely, do you think, is such a scenario? How likely is it that some aspect of implementing copper with those high aspect ratio traces will prove troublesome? It seems to me that we are facing the battle of the etcher/depositioners vs. the polishers. AMD's process uses wider, shallower traces and makes up for them by having additional layers (so a similar number of traces fits per mm2). AMD's approach may make it easier for the automated design tools to produce efficient layouts. Intel supposedly uses armies of engineers to hand optimize their layouts, so being more vertically constrained is less of an issue for them. Each approach seems like the right one for each company. Intel's challenge is to first etch those deep narrow traces, then fill them with copper. AMD's challenge is to polish all those layers of relatively wide shallow traces without removing the soft copper. Deep narrow traces should be easy to polish while wide shallow traces are easy to etch and fill - which company do you think faces the more difficult challenge? Dan