Intel Corp (INTC)

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John, Re: The 1MB version of Hammer will likely sport a surface area of 180 square millimeters, said Kevin Krewell, managing editor of industry newsletter Microprocessor Report. The smaller version for desktops will take up around 105 square millimeters.

Intel's current Pentium 4 and Xeon chip for workstations take up 146 square millimeters of area, according to Intel. These chips contain 512KB of cache. A Xeon with 2MB of cache takes up 268 square millimeters.

Most of the article is a boring rehash of old info. Amazing that Michael Kanellos gets away with it. The above quote, however, confirms a few things for me, one that I remember hearing from Microprocessor Forum. That is that Opteron will be 180mm^2. Compared to Xeon, it is smaller, but I think Kanellos is using an obsolete figure, since Intel has shrunk their .13u chips by about 10% (making the 2MB Xeon about 240mm^2).

On the desktop side, a 105mm^2 Athlon 64 with 256KB L2 cache would compare with a Pentium 4 Northwood at 131mm^2 (again with the 10% shrink). Of course, with SOI yields, AMD may not be able to get as many good die as Intel can, even with the die size advantage. Of course, we've known about that, too, for quite some time.

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