Replies to post #8568 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Sgolds, Re: in 1999 Intel took the P4 design and cut a bunch of performance features so they could move up the time to market. This was in response to Athlon.

Backpeddling, are we? This is not the argument you made in your previous post.

And FWIW, defeaturing is a common tactic when balancing performance with time-to-market. Yes, the defeaturing was probably in response to Athlon. No, it does not mean that Pentium 4 was micro-architected to compete with Athlon.

[Haddock]

Here's another very informative link in the same thread.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=slrnb5c1p7.1j1d.mike%40ducky.net

It's not clear that the reason for the die diet was in order to rush the chip to market. It could just be because of the economies of doing such a big core. P4 was over 200mm2 even with only 256kbytes cache on 0.18um. In fact I think that's more likely, since the die diet must have resulted in some extra work, eg. all the logic for shipping imuls off to the fp unit, schedule them there, and ship them back.