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

To: Joseph Pareti who wrote (150831)	12/3/2001 4:17:38 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 186894

Joe, Re: "why do you think IBM chose SOI for POWER4?" I have several theories, but also remember that many others are going this route as well. At Microprocessor Forum, HP announced that Mako (dual core PA-8700) will be manufactured using SOI and Compaq's final EV7 revision (EV79, due out in 2004) will be on SOI. For IBM, though, there are a few possibilities. 1) one possibility is that power concerns made it impossible to manufacture at the frequencies that they wanted it. At Microprocessor Forum, the IBM representative said that the 1.1GHz SOI chip dissipated 150W! Using simple scaling, the 1.3GHz chip should dissipate up to 180W of power! Just how high do you think this would be without SOI? 2) SOI is IBM's technology, and they want to show it off. What would it sound like to the industry if IBM was pushing SOI, and didn't even use it in their own CPU lines. 3) The benefits of SOI outweighed the penalties in this particular case. Power4 is already an expensive chip, so much so that the added cost of SOI, as well as the lower yield, would not effect gross margins of the design too much. This is very different from a consumer chip, where margins mean everything. 4) IBM may be farther along with SOI than I imagined. They may have improved yields and reduced costs such that the penalties are trivial. Of course, I doubt this possibility, since I am sure IBM would be bragging about it if they did. I'm sure there are other ways to look at this, and maybe some businesses think they need all the competitive advantages that they can get. I believe AMD fits in this category. They don't just want a marginal victory over Intel; Intel's bag of tricks is deep, and any marginal victory can easily turn into a loss for AMD, since AMD is playing the game by Intel's rules (that's what happens when you fight head-to-head with your main competitor). Therefore, AMD will want every last drop of performance, even if it costs them margins (AMD is used to losing money - in fact, they are good at using other people's money ;-). So I think SOI will be a fantastic technology, but it needs some refinement. Not every improvement is a good idea - especially improvements that are difficult to implement. SOI will get to the point where it is a requirement for the future, but there is still time before process technologies get to that point. wbmw