Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

Spokeshave -

Yes, yes. So you keep pointing out. What you are missing is that most of the design work for Hammer was done when AMD had plenty of each.

No need to be condescending. It takes all the fun out of discussing things with you.

Given what you said above, you need to come to grips with the fact that AMD expected the 256K version to be competitive and they expected SOI to be manufacturable at a much earlier stage. Those things didn't happen the way they planned it. Time to implement plan B, or more like plan X/Y/Z by now.

So you Mr. Spokeshave are now the Manager of this project. Your product is too slow to compete, the process yields poorly and you need a much larger die to hope to reach decent ASPs. Your company is hemorrhaging red ink at a record rate and you now need a new unforcasted design team to redo the layout and cache clocking so you can add some more L2. You'll have to spin a few mask sets at about a million a pop, and your validation lab will have to make room for a complete new A64 validation, all over again when you change the cache and layout. As if they didn't have enough to do trying to validate Opteron at 2/4/8 way. At the same time you're under pressure to prepare your product for an eventual 90nm transition but you don't have Design resources to do both much less the money. There's a 1Meg Opteron that's already validated and you could just package it differently and call it an A64. No redesign needed, no validation needed, no muss no fuss and you weren't going to ship high volume anyway! Now your Designers can roll off onto 90nm where the real action is going to be anyway.

What are you going to do Boss? It's your call.