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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yousef who wrote (31667)	4/9/1998 11:30:00 PM
From: Kevin K. Spurway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570881

Re: speed grades The fact of the matter is, Intel picks up one speed grade on AMD simply by virtue of the scale of their production. If two companies both have the same speed bin distribution (say 30% 266 MHz, 40% 300 MHz, 25% 350 MHz, and 5% 400 MHz), but one company has six fabs and the other has one, guess which company is going to introduce the 400 MHz parts first? You guessed it, the one with enough production volume to make it worthwhile to introduce the chip into the channel. Kevin

To: Yousef who wrote (31667)	4/13/1998 12:45:00 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570881

Youssie, re:<why do they have to use .25um processing to accomplish this> Intel could only reach 266 and 300 MHz by upping the transistor current, and hence, the power dissipation to unacceptably high levels. They solved the thermal problem with the proprietary thermal brick, which can dissipate the 30-40 watts that a Pentium II consumes. Without the thermal brick, the top speed of Pentium II would have been thermal-limited at 200 MHz, not even 233. Thermal brick was not an option for AMD or Cyrix. With less than 5% market share, no one would have made mobo's for a proprietary solution. So, in essence, we find again that Intel used their monopoly share to advantage here. Fortunately, the thermal brick is apparently unnecessary at 400 MHz and below when the 0.25µ process is used. Petz