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To: George W Daly, Jr. who wrote (66865)10/16/1998 1:38:00 PM
From: Paul Engel  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894
 
George - Re: " 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. "

This is an excellent point and MAGNIFIES the performance of Intel's processing technology.

The PowerPC 750 is a "pure risc" chip, as you know since I believe it has its roots in your RIOS chips of the 1980's.

The long standing argument FOR RISC chips was that they were simpler, had only LOAD/STORE memory operations, orthogonal instruction sets, instruction lengths were constant, etc.

ERGO, RISC chips were ALWAYS regarded as having higher clock speeds than the kludgy x86 baggage.

But Intel has managed to produce x86 baggage that clocks faster than more advanced (Copper/0.12 Leff gates) Power PC chips.

The argument about about what computations get done per clock cycle is a different argument, although significant since computations are what the processors are used for.

And other than specific, Apple contracted-and-paid-for BYTE Benchmarks - that nobody else uses but Apple and BYTE - the fast Intel chips and the PowerPC 750 are not all that different.

My conclusion that Intel's process technology is more capable than IBM's is valid because Intel uses "standard , conventional" processing with larger feature sizes since it is an "older" technology by at least one process generation.

Paul