Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[aixman]

"Athlon XP to 90nm - why?"

I'd like to rephrase that question and ask "Why not?"

Basically, it appears that both K7 and K8 have pretty much similar pipelines and similar limitations with respect to clock speed. At least at the moment.

Thus AMD's choice is either to switch its entire line to K8 ASAP, or extend the life of K7 on 90nm.

Going to K8 core ASAP forces AMD to deal with larger dies, and fewer chips. This will make each K8 chip produced more expensive than a K7 core.

Extending the life of K7 on 90nm will require some engineering effort. However, the costs are likely to be one time and trivial (<10mil $, and probably much less).

AMD will need a low end chip regardless, and wasting larger K8 for that does not seem to make much sense. Also, K7 motherboards are pretty abundant, which takes out the infrastructure issues.

So, monetarily, sticking with K7 for a bit longer can make sense if the engineering effort is feasible and not too costly.

Can anyone give us any indication about what it would take to move K7 to 90nm, possibly with SOI?