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

To: pgerassi who wrote (217898)	11/29/2006 11:08:43 PM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Pete, thanks for taking the time to write the general explanation. But I have a more specific question. Maybe its too specific. Is the current AMD 65 nm transistor design what will be used in K8L ? I have read in many places that the clock speeds for AMD's 65 nm introduction are surprisingly low. They also seem unnaturally binned, where the top bin at 2.6 GHz is just 4% higher than the next at 2.5 GHz. Which I interpret to mean that there will not be any overclock capacity in the parts coming next week. They are already stretched as far as they can go. Also, we saw the AMD FX-74 was made on 90 nm, with high power consumption and heat, as well as large silicon area. I interpret that to mean AMD could not get high performance out of their 65 nm chips, even though they have been working on them for a couple of years. Is that a reasonable conclusion ? Especially since it is on a brand new mother board. So it's not like AMD is giving customers an upgrade path. To me this suggests that the AMD transistor design has reached its limits, and products based on it will be poor performers. Does this bode well for K8L next year ? Or is there no conclusion to draw from the K8 65 nm ? Thanks, Sarmad p.s. My knowledge on this subject is near zero. maybe negative. So no one needs to worry about their AMD investment. Not based on my remarks, anyway. edit. Also, it seems the investment case for AMD at this time is based on expanding markets, and higher revenue, and not on having the top performing processors.

To: pgerassi who wrote (217898)	11/30/2006 8:59:22 AM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Sorry Pete.....but much of what you say here is misleading. As far as I can tell, no one here has grasped the concept of transistor length vs width. Length (the real short dimension) is the distance from source to drain. Width is the width of the silicon island which the gate crosses from one side to another.....isolating the source from the drain. Remember.....drive current at a fixed channel LENGTH is expressed as nA/um of channel WIDTH From 90nm to 65 nm,the channel WIDTH shrinks by the scaling factor, the silicon island area shrinks by the scaling factor^2 but in the first 65nm device, the channel LENGTH stays the same (at least according to AMD). THE WATSONYOUTH