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

To: Charles R who wrote (43478)	6/9/2001 12:28:30 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: This is a bogus issue. Thunderbird and Palomino in Fab30 should have nearly identical yields The difference between "should have" and "did have" is what nearly killed AMD. Consider that the larger Palamino core, at a higher voltage, uses significantly less power than thunderbird. There are differences between the two chips, and there is about a 3 month lag between when production is scheduled and the output can be confirmed good. If AMD switched all production to Palamino after a first few lots turned out OK, a subtle problem with Palamino mass production could result in the loss of a quarter's production. A full quarter's production. They'd be nuts to do as you suggest.

To: Charles R who wrote (43478)	6/11/2001 6:07:06 AM
From: fyodor_	Respond to of 275872

Charles: This is a bogus issue. Thunderbird and Palomino in Fab30 should have nearly identical yields (not necessarily bin splits). I'll submit that my knowledge of production and design issues is limited, but it seems to me that we just don't know what AMD have done in Palomino to reduce the power consumption ~ 20%. Such changes would seem to be able to influence either bin splits or overall yields, depending on what exactly was done. I recall reading several articles (in layman's terms - e.g. EETimes) about techniques in producing low-power transistors and circuits. This included everything from adding circuitry to shut off sections of the CPU that aren't being used to redesigning the transistors themselves. The latter affected mainly switching speed (and thus mainly bin splits), but the former - as well as a host of other changes - could well significantly affect overall yields. -fyo