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

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (217985)	11/29/2006 11:53:57 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

All I can tell you is that AMD has said they make incremental transistor improvements every quarter or so. I don't know how successful they'll be. Check the slides from the June Tech Day. More problematic for the QC K8L will be the very large die size of 289 mm^2. That's going to hurt yields. This is a place where the MCM approach pays dividends for Intel. If they did not increase cache, assuming a 58% shrink of ~150mm^2 Conroe, they stick together 2 ~87mm^2 45nm dies to make a part. Now, of course, they are growing the L2 cache, but then again, that portion of the die has built-in redundancy, and doesn't impact yield as much as the other portions.

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (217985)	11/30/2006 12:15:49 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"Apparently it just isn't compatible with the process they're using for 65 nm." It has little to with compatibility. SiGe strain has a lot of "knobs" to be tuned. Until you quantify them, it affects yields. It pretty obvious that AMD is focussed on high yields at a power envelop of 62 watts at 65nm. So significant SiGe strain is something for later. AMD has moved beyond the need to roll the hard six. They need to make conservative choices for the next few years. Yeah, it means they fall behind the performance curve at times, but if they can play in all segments of the market, that isn't death. Especially if they have a comeback in the next few quarters.