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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: daryll40 who wrote (48830)7/7/2001 7:33:30 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 70976
 
IMO, Intel needs to spend more effort on architecture than on processing technology. While their latest chips run as fast as the process will allow, they don't use the full transistor density that the process gives them. That is, they are not fully exploiting the potential Moore's Law gains. (Don't believe me? Dig up the number of transistors per Intel MPU going back to the 8086. The rate of increase has really leveled off in the last few generations.)

They're increasing the amount of memory per chip, but not the amount of logic (or at least they aren't increasing the amount of logic as fast as they theoretically could). Their architects haven't figured out how to make those "extra" transistors do something useful.

I'm not a chip architect, so I'm not going to speculate what that "something useful" might be. The company that figures out the answer will be the one that creates the next killer app.

Katherine



To: daryll40 who wrote (48830)7/7/2001 10:27:09 PM
From: Math Junkie  Respond to of 70976
 
Re: When I said first in the food chain, I meant that Intel, etc. has nothing to sell (no reason for consumers to upgrage) if they don't spend on technology to develop a better chip. They'll never dig themselves out if they don't make their "widget" do more, and do more faster.

The slowdown was not caused by a lack of new technology. It was caused by external economic conditions.


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