To: Greg S. who wrote (8231 ) 10/15/1998 2:56:00 AM From: Eric Howard Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Greg, I agree for the most part with what you said but since I used to work for that particular "evil empire" in the past I just wanted to mention a few subtle points. The graphics card companies 3dfx, Nvidia, S3, ATI etc design their chips and then get an ASIC house to fab them. In the case of Nvidia and 3dfx I believe the fab is TSMC. TSMC creates a process say .35 micron and a corresponding library. 3dfx then designs their chip using that library and pays the fab to create their chips. Since Intel has their own fabs they do pay less to manufacture but more importantly their process and libraries are designed and optimized exactly for the type of chips they are trying to build. Intel's fabs, process technology and Cad tools are all developed at the same time giving them the ability to milk alot more performance out of a process then an ASIC house will ever be able to get. The original Pentium had 3 million transistors, was done on a .8 micron process and still ran at 66mhz. The next set of Pentiums the 90 and 100mhz version were done on a .6 micron process. The 90-100 mhz parts were sold for more money then the 60 -66 mhz chips but they cost less to make because they had a smaller die size, hence more could fit on a wafer. Likewise the 450 mhz Pentium costs Intel less to make then the 300 mhz version on a per part basis.
