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

To: grok who wrote (51748)	3/6/1999 1:10:00 AM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572749

"Perhaps Intel's legal department should be called Stupid Inside." I thought these were good reads not yet posted here. "Intel puts legal screws on Ugeek" theregister.co.uk "Movement to halt Pentium III grows" news.com "Hacking Intel's CPU ID" hardwarecentral.com On a side note, that Next Generation Playstation is going to have a very large processor. "Gate width 0.18 micron VDD Voltage 1.8 V Power Consumption 15 Watts Metal Layers 4 Total Transistors 10.5 Million Die Size 240 mm2 Package 540pin PBGA" 240mm2 on .18 micron!? Could one of the reasons be because it has 4 layers? ars-technica.com

To: grok who wrote (51748)	3/6/1999 3:28:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572749

<Alpha is said by its designers to be short tick because it has an extremely high clock rate but doesn't do a whole lot in a cycle. It also has a long pipeline.> Nice introduction, but everything is backwards. Alpha has a long pipeline because they WANT every stage to be "short tick". To make the tick "short", they had to reduce amount of sequential gates in stage logic, and therefore they can't do "a whole lot" in a cycle, as you correctly noticed. As a result, the pipeline must have more stages to execute same instructions. But because the number of sequential gates in stages is strictly limited by design, the stage propagation time is short, and that is why the frequency is high. This is called a "superpipelined" design. It was invented by DEC and apparently stolen by Intel. As it follows from AMD optimization guide, K6 executes most instructions in just 4 stages. Now compare this with 12-14 stages in Pentium-II/Pro, and you may arrive to a conclusion that the stage complexity in K6 must be much higher, not to say 3 times, but around that. However, the overall K6 frequency is just 20% below Pentiums. Now draw your own conclusion about who makes better FETs. Only idiots from Intel Supremacy Klan with "make is so Phd" cannot see this "tiny architecture thing" and blatantly try to compare incomparable things. Take care, - Ali <end of the lecture>