Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

wbmw -

Would you normally expect a 1.6GHz chip to have such small headroom unless it was hand sorted or rescreened?

All parts are individually screened, fast ones and slow ones, and they have to have a speed guardband to compensate for the inevitable degradation that results from some long term effects to silicon. There is always speed distribution. I recently bought an Intel 2.4GHz P4 and it has very little overclockability, I was unlucky. I would think 2.4GHz is very near the bottom of the speed distribution, if not below it. Maybe it's the cheap memory I bought? You have to look at a large distribution to get a good feel for the overall process however this one single sample point is not inconsistent with the other data that says AMD has yet to get a good handle on manufacturing Hammer. Now if you got a 1.6GHz Hammer and it easily overclocked, that would be unexpected!