Replies to post #13198 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Elmer Phud]

Sgolds -

Elmer, that was disingenuous! Refer back to my post -

Hardly. The claim here by the faithful is that Opteron is in great demand and Itanium isn't. If anything, your post suggesting that low volume for both Opteron and Itanium could both be attributed to "unmanufacturability" is in stark contrast to that belief. There is nothing whatsoever about Intel's track record that suggests manufacturing problems and everything about AMD's. Your comparison was disingenuous.

For anyone who might be interested in what the industry means by "manufacturable" it means it can be produced with near industry standard yields, consistently and reliably, and sold at a profit. Producing a few thousand Opterons does not meet this criteria and technically selling only a few 10s of thousands of Itaniums does not demonstrate manufacturability either however, given Intel's manufacturing track record I would be much more inclined to give Itanium the nod. I know there are some here who will cry and stomp their feet but I don't define the terms. Don't blame the messenger.

[Petz]

IMO the biggest proof of Hammer family manufacturability is the fact that AMD decided to make all of them with a 1M L2 cache. If they were having yield problems, they certainly would have cut back to the 256K version for most chips and just built a few "benchmark" chips like Intel does with the 6M L3 Itaniums.

Petz