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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fingolfen who wrote (135131)	5/15/2001 4:23:14 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Fin, When AMD went to Cu, they shrunk the back-end to 0.18 micron as well, which would provide a bin improvement. Again, it doesn't mean that the boost came from the copper itself. I don't know the breakdown of what contributed more, and I suspect that neither do you, therefore we can't say with any certainty that Cu doesn't provide an advantage (which you in your post here: siliconinvestor.com I never said that there was NO advantage to Cu, just not a speed advantage. The major advantage of Cu is in solving electromigration problems... hence the reason Intel is moving to it for 0.13 micron. If it helps reduce power consumption, that alone will result in a speed improvement in processors that are heat limited. On the move to .13u, will still have an Al .13u process, or only Cu? Joe

To: fingolfen who wrote (135131)	5/15/2001 5:16:41 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

I can see one source of misconception here. Based on what I've read from Intel, they saw no speed advantage at the 0.18 micron generation technology for Cu. If memory serves, AMD never had a true 0.18 micron aluminum process. They had 0.18 micron transistors coupled to a roughly 0.22 micron aluminum backend. Simply going to a 0.18 micron back-end would provide a performance boost. When AMD went to Cu, they shrunk the back-end to 0.18 micron as well, which would provide a bin improvement. Again, it doesn't mean that the boost came from the copper itself Where do you get this stuff regarding AMD AL .22um BEOL?? This is pure nonsense. Were the Dresden and Austin Athlon .18um chip size different??? You come to conclusions without any factual information to base them on and yet they seem to always favor your position that Intel's decisions are sacrosanct. How about giving me a couple of examples of Intel decisions that maybe could have been better. How about one really bonehead one that even Fingolfen couldn't believe. I just want to make sure that these kind of discussions are worth my while. For the record, I think both Intel and AMD made the right decision on when to go to copper. It was obviously correct for AMD to equip the new fab from the start as a copper fab. I think Intel also did the right thing with Coppermine. It would have been impossible for them to retool their entire fab capacity to copper at that time for minimal if any performance gain. But, if you remember, they had to go thru a painstaking re-layout of the entire BEOL to insure it would not be BEOL limited with Al interconnects. And their conclusions were likely based on modeling - not comparative hardware. It is just as likely that AMD could produce comparative hardware that indicated for all other things equal, their copper BEOL did indeed produce a performance (albeit <5%) advantage at .18um. It's all in the details of the relative implementations which you or I know nothing about. Everyone admits that the advantage at .18um is at best minimal. (<5%) But, to claim NO advantage is probably just as self serving as for AMD to claim 10%. THE WATSONYOUTH