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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (20721)	6/24/1998 4:41:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Capacity of the same design increases with shrinks. Capacity of a new design depends on both the feature size (shrink) and the complexity of the chip. If you shrink your transistors by 50%, but then add 50% more of them, your die size, and thus your capacity, stays the same. Katherine

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (20721)	6/24/1998 5:48:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

OK Teri - Lets go through the math: 1) The Pentium MMX has 4.5M transistors 2) The P-II has 7.5M transistors 3) Last year at this time Intel was 50% 0.25u (and the rest 0.35u) 4) This year Intel is 100% 0.25u 5) Last year 100% of Intel production was Pentium MMX 6) This year 100% of Intel production in P-II Facts 1 and 2 come from byte.com Facts 3 thru 6 are approximations, but probably pretty good. The capacity 'increase' this year due to shrinks alone is: [(1.0/(0.25)^2)/(0.5/(0.25)^2+0.5/(0.35)^2)]4.5/7.5=0.8 Surprise, surprise, the shrinks by themselves were not enough to increase capacity when the move to P-II is taken into account. Of course they have obtained capacity from elsewhere (e.g. DEC), but the point is shrinks often aren't enough to increase unit capacity if the number of transistors per unit keeps going up. Clark PS I challenge you to find the "engineer or two's inputs last time"* where "the answer was.... capacity is increased with shrinks alone." I would have remembered. I suspect it was a misunderstanding.