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To: tcmay who wrote (140351)	7/28/2001 1:35:22 PM
From: Elmer	Respond to of 186894

WHERE IS SOI FOR THE PPC? If SOI is so much faster, and if Motorola and IBM have a manufacturable, economical process for SOI, why has it not been applied for actual chips being sold to actual customers? If Motorola and IBM are so danged far ahead in SOI, where are they for the very chips they say will beat Intel? Exactly the point I was making last week. If AMD fans are looking for IBM technology to bail them out of a hole, they should be asking themselves the same question you raised above. Where is this great technology and how come it hasn't produced any competitive products? EP

To: tcmay who wrote (140351)	7/28/2001 4:20:41 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: you have claimed that AMD's reliance on basically just their single mega-fab, Dresden, implies that they must have superior yields to Intel No, I've never made such a claim. What I've posted is that the huge size of P4 means Intel has to process about 3 times as many wafers as AMD to get the same number of chips. If you'll review my various posts, you'll see that, for die of similar size, I generally assume about 10% lower yields for AMD than for Intel. I don't know if that's really true, but Elmer keeps posting that Intel's yields are better than AMD, while AMD makes statements during SEC monitored conference calls that their yields are better than 70%, so I'm guessing AMD percentage yields in 70s and Intel yields in the 80s (for coppermine). The laws of physics drive good die per wafer yields lower as die size goes up. Since more of the wafer is used for each chip, a defect that affects one chip affects more of the wafer. In other words, if the wafer has 30 defects on it that wreck 30 of the die, yield will be considerably higher for a wafer that started with 225 coppermines (87%) than one that started with 100 P4s (70%). Edge loss also affects more of the wafer when die are larger. So even with an all-else-equal process advantage in yield, volume production of P4 uses up a lot of wafers.

To: tcmay who wrote (140351)	7/28/2001 4:33:38 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: If Motorola and IBM are so danged far ahead in SOI, where are they for the very chips they say will beat Intel? You'll have to wait just a little longer - IBM, AMD, and Motorola are all using similar technology and bringing volume production on-line at about the same time: Intel is 18 months behind (as usual). IBM Corp. has found a way to bring a niche chip-manufacturing technique to the mainstream and boost performance of its fastest microprocessors by more than 30%. The Fishkill, N.Y., technology giant has incorporated the technique, known as silicon-on-insulator (SOI), into its main semiconductor production lines, and plans to introduce a 1-GHz PowerPC 750 chip in the first half of next year ebnews.com Cracking the 1-GHz barrier comes as a result of incorporating "silicon on insulator" (SOI) technology to the 700-MHz G4 processor described last year, Bearden said. SOI adds an extra layer of insulation that improves how electrons travel around a processor. With SOI, PC manufacturers can shoot for higher performance or lower power consumption. Bearden, for instance, pointed out that Motorola has demonstrated a 22 percent increase in performance over identical non-SOI chips. Conversely, SOI-enabled processors consume 30 percent less power than non-SOI chips running at the same speed. "The design will support maximum frequencies above 1 GHz," he said. "The V'Ger and the Apollo have fundamentally the same architecture...The difference is SOI." news.cnet.com