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

To: whortso who wrote (138006)	6/24/2001 10:10:08 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: Someone said... Intel hasn't yet published the numbers for the other versions of the tualatin, but if they are consistent with what has so far been released, then it confirms that .13 copper without SOI (or very low capacitance) doesn't offer much. Around 2 years ago, I posted that certain behavior of Intel confirmed that RDRAM was not as good as they were claiming. The behavior was their lawsuit to try to prevent VIA from shipping any PC133 chipsets at the same time Justice was pushing a fairly strong anti-trust case against them. The only conceivable motivation for such a bizarre action was that their own RDRAM chipset program was turning out to be a disaster. Paul, Elmer, Windsock, and, of course, Intel screamed, whined, and swore that RDRAM would provide a huge benefit and let Intel bury AMD - we know how that one turned out... Last fall / this spring, we saw AMD, a company with only one FAB that makes significant money and certainly not a company with limitless capital to play with, do something very strange: With delicate microprocessor operations continuing below, (they had no choice) they built a large FAB extension on pillars above the Dresden FAB. They did this to provide for SOI in their .13 copper process. They said that without SOI, moving to .13 provided much less of a benefit than had come from earlier shrinks. Given their limits, I can't imagine AMD would make such an expensive, risky move unless they were telling the truth. A copper process is quite different from an Aluminum process and inevitably brings with it a substantial new stepping, if not a new core. For example AMD's recent major stepping/core change for Athlon reduced current 34% at .18 even though a larger TLB, SSE, and prefetch were all added to the chip. Intel's recent stepping change plus a move from .18 A. to .13 Cu reduced current by only 14% for the same family core running at the same voltage. Message 15986936