Replies to post #28193 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[dougSF30]

there's a lot of people who still think that Prescott won't scale because it was launched at the same frequency as Northwood.

No, there are a lot of people who think that Prescott won't scale because it can already dissipate up to 115W at the 3.2 and 3.4 GHz speed grades.

Doug

[jhalada]

wbmw,

First, Northwood was surprisingly better than Willamette, but it couldn't clock much higher at first. It launched at a low volume 2.2GHz

I thought Northwood did well from the beginning. Willamette did reach 2 GHz, but at low volume. Northwood could deliver sufficient volume at any bin Intel needed. The performance jump over Willamette was also very good. AMD K7 never managed to successfully compete with it.

What I don't get is why Intel did not shrink Northwood to 90nm before doing something as complicated as Prescott.

Joe

[Dan3]

Re: The argument of die size fell quiet very quickly when Intel began selling die that were much smaller. Prescott is only

Prescott isn't really out yet and AMD's 90nm response will be shipping pretty soon.

You should be comparing 130nm Northwood to 130nm Newcastle (or 230mm2 1m cache Xeon to 193mm2 1meg cache Opteron).

[Dan3]

Re: you take a snapshot of one chip on a new process, and assume the process is broken and will take 2 years to fix.

Intel has been failing to ship Dothan and Prescott since late last summer. Precott could have been a design issue but Dothan is primarily a shrink. They're just going from 130nm copper to 90nm copper, both on bulk silicon.

Should be a piece of cake, right?

AMD's first shrink of a copper process was a mess, and it was the terrible time that AMD had doing it's first shrink of a copper process that let Northwood start looking good. AMD progress was very slow from the time of their great success after they first introduced copper to the X86 CPU world and they didn't do well again until they became the first to introduce SOI to the X86 world.

Intel regained a lot of ground after they followed AMD to a copper process, but now that AMD has moved on to an SOI process, AMD is taking new ground in the workstation and server spaces, and regaining ground in desktops and notebooks - and revenue...

[yourbankruptcy]

wbmw, Prescott is 113 mm^2, newcoming Athlon 64 is 102 mm^2 - what's the problem?