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

To: Petz who wrote (217703)	11/28/2006 2:20:25 AM
From: dougSF30	Respond to of 275872

The point is also that the fastest 65nm speed bin will be 400MHz slower than the fastest 90nm speed bin. That's bad for the initial stepping of 65nm, and it is not projected to improve until Q207, which is really bad.

To: Petz who wrote (217703)	11/28/2006 5:27:17 AM
From: Rink	Respond to of 275872

Petz, the slowest 90nm parts that are rated 90W might well consume below 65W max in reality. Some of these lower power ratings are marketing moves more than technical ones. Power consumption of avg frequency 65nm 65W parts should be a good bit below avg frequency 90nm parts. Although I think that's the case we won't know for sure until it's measured by one of the more sophisticated sites. I'm not that worried about the frequency being a bit below 90nm currently. It has happened a lot in recent process transitions for both AMD and Intel. Frequency can be improved with a better additional process techniques like strained Si, SOI, immersion, finfets, metal gates, high-k, etc... (more than switching to newer nodes that is). The other way is with completely new designs targeting the higher frequencies. For example AMD is currently using the rather similar transistors with the new process (rev G vs rev F) while Intel used a complete new design instead (CMW vs Yonah) which was successful in targeting higher frequencies. AMD has been putting more emphasis at infrastructure in their designs, Intel has put more emphasis into improving the cores themselves. In the future this might change with Intel implementing CSI and AMD implementing ATI logic into their cores. Anyway, power consumption is actually even a bit more important to AMD's longer term future than frequency is as it allows QC. OTOH AMD needs the higher frequencies to be able to compete with similar vastly improved Intel products, even to an extent when comparing Barcelona to a later native QC from Intel (I'm not sure when this will happen, maybe Q1/08?). Power consumption will have to improve even more compared to rev G before getting QC at reasonable frequencies. In this context I really would like to know where AMD is now with transitioning to newer transistors and where they will be in a year. Regards, Rink