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

To: pgerassi who wrote (75616)	3/26/2002 1:54:18 PM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (8) \| Respond to of 275872

"they now seem to make the most mileage out of that design lead by using a die size that maximizes revenue per wafer." I think AMD is making a big strategic mistake by taking a low-profile small-size path, with all this short-sighted "revenue per wafer". They will lose in the long run. Why? 1. In the PC business, performance sells, and will be. Either MHz-based, which is easy to communicate to buying public, or true performance, which must have a clear undisputed lead. 2. As core frequencies continue to rise, the gap between memory and processor will continue to widen, and off-chip traffic will eventually dominate on current platforms. 3. Effectiveness of x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) seems to reach its limit - no matter what the implementation is, inner performance is about the same. 4. To get more performance, the off-chip traffic must be reduced, which means better caches, which means bigger on-chip caches. 5. Bigger cache requires bigger die. Therefore, strategically, the 300mm fabbing and big-die big-cache chips will have increasing advantage, and will be more and more economical as die shrinks. 6. Smaller-die theory will break: the die cannot be made smaller than certain size, I guess about 80-100mm2, because of pad/bump limitations, and current density/power dissipation limits. The smaller die will not scale down as well as bigger die. 7. That's it. I don't know what AMD is thinking, but the published tactics of "smaller die" is poised to fail again, IMHO. Sorry. - Ali