Replies to post #7923 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

CJ, as I indicated in another post, the pipeline depth is not the only thing that affects the frequency limit of a processor. IBM made a design decision not to implement custom circuits, and they lost a lot of frequency potential by doing so. AMD can certainly help them customize their circuits for high performance, but this is also something that IBM can do by themselves, if they choose to. The trade-off is performance vs time to market.

[chipguy]

As I have pointed out before, PPC970 has a 16 stage pipeline and will top at 2GHz on their
130nm process, AMD can do at least 1.8GHz on their 130nm process. Ok, you can't really
compare the two processors straight up, but you'd generally expect a processor with close
to twice the number of pipeline stages to clock a bit higher, assuming roughly the same
amount of work per stage.

Keep in mind that about half the processor was created using logic synthesis of HDL,
code, the 970 can dispatch and retire up to 5 native instructions per cycle, it is only
118 mm2 despite having a 512 KB L2 cache, and it can run at 1.8 GHz at only 1.3 V.