1) A design and process combo with a center frequency of 1.9 GHz will yield three sigma fast process tail end parts of about 2.5 GHz. In large quantities across many wafer batches roughly 1 in 400 parts will run at a production quality 2.5 GHz.
2) A production 2.5 GHz processor has to be guaranteed to run in all motherboards in all systems with different chipsets, VRMs, DIMMs etc whether the system is in a hot office in Phoenix or a cold basement in Anchorage. This requires some guard banding to ensure all combinations of parts and systems run reliably anywhere. But if you hand match a specific part to a specific motherboard, system, chipset, memory etc you can probably coax a 2.5 GHz into reliable operation in a benign environment to say 2.6 GHz at stock voltage and cooling without much problem.
3) An advanced CMOS integrated circuit has to operate under a certain combination of supply voltage and junction temperature to achieve an aceptable level of reliability and lifetime. However it can be operated at significantly higher temperatures and voltages at the cost of expon- entially reduced lifetime. This is how you do accelerated aging studies to establish those acceptable levels in the first place.
running a 970FX MPU in IBM's 90 nm SOI process at 1.3V instead of 1.2 V reduces its expected lifetime from 100k hours to 50k hours.
So how much could AMD raise the voltage (and junction temperature, given standard cooling) of a demo sample that only needed a lifetime of say 1000 hours? Or even 100 hours? A great deal. More than the 200 or 300 mV boost that would likely raise our three sigma golden Phenom sample in carefully matched motherboard and system to a nice round 3.0 GHz to show off to credulous analysts and fan-boys everywhere.
But AMD is still left trying to raise their 1.9 GHz center frequency so they don't end up producing as many parts binning out below 1.9 GHz as above. ;-)
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