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

To: Gary Ng who wrote (37002)	9/13/1998 3:19:00 PM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570717

Gary Ng: <<There is one thing I don't quite understand. Digital(Now part of Compaq) has been in this Alpha business for quite some time and still they have problem releasing 21264.>> Alpha 21264 system is already released. Compaq is selling such system. One thing to note is that the Alpha 21264 die size is HUGE, about 300mm^2 on 0.35um, that is about 2X Mendocino. No wonder yield is not so hot. You are talking about maximum of 60 dice/8" wafer. <<Since K7 will be here in 1H99, would that imply that AMD's engineers are much much more smarter than Digital's ? And if they are that smart, how come they have so many problems in the K5, K6 product ?>> AMD had a problem with the K5 because they didn't have the experience designing the CPU. K6 was designed by Nexgen engineers. They are very good. K6 was well ahead of schedule and K6-2 was on schedule. K6 problem was purely due to manufacturing issues not designing issues. As I remembered the Nexgen group that designed the K6/K6-2 had less than 100 engineers, whereas Intel used more than 1000 engineers to design the PII and 600+ to design the Celeron/CeleronA. Yes Nexgen designers are that good. The K7 is also designed by the same group including many engineers from DEC who designed the Alpha 21264. From what I heard the K7 designers are very good. Thus just hold your breath. AMD will release the K7 architecture on October 15. I will be looking forward to it. My prediction is that the K7 will top PII performance since the architecture was originally derived from the Alpha 21264. Maxwell