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

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210913)	9/14/2006 1:07:18 PM
From: Rink	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Chris, wow, a much more elaborate answer than I expected. Very insightful. I may start asking you more of these kind of questions :) Actually I've got one now. For QC overall power consumption per core will need to come down a lot. As the capacitive load of the wires goes down with the scaling of the wire pitch I presume it reduces the power consumption per core (presuming the amount of transistors per core is about the same). Can you provide any insight if and how relevant the reduction in power is as a result of wire scaling? (Other things that I think will help in the short to mid term future are improved strain and sSOI wafers, but the vague idea that wire scaling might possibly help is new to me) Tx, regards, Rink

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210913)	9/14/2006 1:52:08 PM
From: fastpathguru	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Well, if the wires are scaled 100%, that means their area are halved in areas of the chip that are wire limited - like the core. That makes the wires "twice as fast" - well not entirely, since there's inductance too, and resistance changes in a nonlinear way in response to size reduction at nano scales. I would intuitively expect frequency to scale with the length of the wires, not their area... i.e. 90(nm)/60(nm)% (not including other effects...) fpg

To: ChrisBBo who wrote (210913)	9/15/2006 6:06:12 AM
From: DDB_WO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Regarding AMD's 65nm process - did you already have a look at the following comparison of 65nm prototype vs. 90nm core at nearly correct scale (based on DDR pads, but size is in the ballpark of the size measured on 300mm wafer): img132.imageshack.us The whole core doesn't scale so much, but the individual units, SRAMs etc. do. E.g. the integer unit width or FP reg file width are reduced to ~70% or even somewhat less. There was already a discussion here: aceshardware.com