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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (55709)	5/17/1998 12:15:00 AM
From: Time Traveler	Respond to of 186894

The reason why the die size grows bigger why feature size shrinks is that the bigger the die size the higher power dissipation it can sustain until case-to-ambient thermal resistance (heat transfer capacity) is dominant. The higher the frequency of operation the higher is the power dissipated. Since Intel has demonstrated a P-II able to run at 500+MHz with adequate cooling, the easiest way is just to increase the die size. With added increase in silicon real estate, more features are thus added, like an FPU, MMX extension, L1 cache, and very soon L2 cache. We have seen this trend through out the development of CPUs, from 8088/86 to P-II. However, increasing the die size to processors that cannot run at higher speed despite adequate refrigeration have no affect, obviously (K6 being an example). Perhaps, Kurlak is only looking at K6 when he made that faulty analysis. Time Traveler