Intel Corp (INTC)

[Elmer Phud]

Dew -

Before I decided to answer this post I looked at the other responses and I think they both missed the mark. First off, you can not infer anything whatsoever about speed distribution based on maximum frequency rating because market forces dictate which speeds can be sold and at what price. TMTA may simply be doing an "AMD". Announcing products it has no ability to manufacture but must give the impression it can. If however you want to assume that 1GHz is at the high end of the frequency distribution then you need to know something about who is fabing their parts before estimating the range of distribution. A foundry is optimized for yield and not speed. I would expect to see a greater frequency distribution from a foundry than a dedicated CPU house like Intel or AMD. Depending on the forces brought to bear, the later two would probably have a much tighter frequency distribution for a given process. Perhaps one of those two may even suffer major yield loss trying to raise the distribution to remain competitive. I will not speculate on which one that might be but I will point the reader to the recently released financial statements where perhaps clues may be found...

I would also discourage anyone from concluding that the pricing and volumes for any speed grade is a surrogate for binsplit determination. This need not be the case. Once again market forces could determine the best pricing points for maximizing profits when binsplits may be well in advance of the competition. A device labeled xGHz could perform well in excess of that speed. The rating simply guarantees a minimum. If the market sweetspot happens to favor a point below the distribution mean than a faster device could be substituted. Too many unknowns and too many variables to draw conclusions on TMTA but for the other two companies Intel seems to have no trouble supplying their highest bins while AMD appears unable to supply theirs.

EP