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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (66824)	10/16/1998 1:20:00 PM
From: George W Daly, Jr.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Paul, I am not in the least confused. I have been a designer for 15 years. Let me restate it since I wasn't clear: You cannot compare the manufacturing process capabilities of two companies by making a frequency comparison of chips with two completely different architectures. The operating frequency of those chips is dependent on logic design and circuit design as well as the underlying process. I believed you were trying to do this a while back with your statement << No - Intel is AHEAD of IBM because Intel's 0.25 micron process produces FASTER CPUs that IBM's copper-based 0.18 micron process. The PowerPC 750 chip you refer to was introduced at only 400 MHz as I recall whereas Intel is SHIPPING 450 MHz Pentium II's and Xeons built on their "slightly tweaked" 0.25 micron process. >> If you just want to use the pure frequency game, why not use the 465 MHz CMOS processors(w/o copper I think, not positive) in our mainframe S390 archictecture. Or better yet, why not the 1 GHz test chip we demonstrated that was in last years process and contained a complete CPU integer unit. We are also shipping a 200 MHz processor with the same process that has floating point spec numbers that are best in the world for a uni since it has 8 execution units in all, and 3 of them are for floating point. These are design tradeoffs, pure and simple, NOT poor logic design. Sure everyone would love to have it all, complexity and speed and Intel is going after that with McKinley. Just don't count IBM out. Thats all I'm saying... Oh and FWIW, I am VERY impressed with the 4-way Xeon TPC numbers. This is a very formidable competitor in the integer space and makes me glad I have an investment in INTC. GWD