To: Yousef who wrote (26334 ) 12/2/1997 1:44:00 PM From: Bill Jackson Respond to
Yousef; Since I am not a designer I am falling back on a mechanical analog, of say a valve train in a car which has mech components that have to be in the right place at the right time for the car to work. As they run faster the minor tolerances, spring constants etc and at some point it fails when run faster and faster. By analogy the internal gates, how they rise, fall settle will have a similar max frequency of operation. This will vary somewhat with all the various times allotted by the design team for them, and they will shave a fraction here and there and tighten up these chains to result in a faster speed before a conflict occurs. Part of the potential will be realized by superior design, and part by superior fabrication. I made no mention of Intel versus others in terms of speed and design, and they are the overall leader in the area, however like many large companies they are becoming susceptable to nimble competitors, like AMD, Cyrix etc who can make the optimization cycles(both in design and production) more rapidly than Intel and eventually get quite close to Intel in performance.
