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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (7042)	9/10/1998 6:23:00 AM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Here's a cool post I caught on the usenet about TNT: ************************************** To anyone who reads this... I have an interesting rumour to do with the core speed decrease on a TnT. Apparently, 4 months ago (just as the TnT was being laid out on silicon), SGS-Thompson who make the TnT chip found that the several areas of the alpha chip were running too hot. Basically my friend was being shown around the HQ in the UK here for a job interview and said he saw the diagrams for the chip with the heat patches marked in red. Now the overall heat dissipation is OK, but if you heat up small areas of a chip then big problems with the lifetime of the device arise. It appears that NVidia have been forced to repeatedly slow the clockrate down to bring the board into line with operating tolerances. Localised heating of the chip just smacks of bad design-manufacture conversion. It appears that NVidia, instead of putting the release date back so they could implement a redesign, just stuck to their position and hoped that the problem would go away. The result is that they just couldn't get a high enough yield of chips that ran at the full clock rate. The TnT is a good chip with a flawed architecture. My advice to anyone is that buying a TnT now will lead to tears in the future. It's performance problems due to the lower clockrate now put it within reach of the G200 (which, although it is slower, at least is proven technology). Running on the bleeding edge is always a bumpy ride. A lot of people who bought Voodoo2's on the day of release regretted it later due to Glide incompatibilities and the price premium. Wait a while, you won't regret it. CHAZ