Robert Myers <rbmyersusa (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in part:
There's also the small matter of yield: a process that yields
80% of 150 mm2 dice will only yield ~41% of 600 mm2 dice. Only
if you start with a process capable of 95% yield at 150mm2
could you hope for 80% at 600.

Hmm ... I wonder if inflating yield isn't the true reason for
ECC on cache. It hides both soft errors and hard defects.

-- Robert

On Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:16:16 GMT, "Felger Carbon" <fnsfmf (AT) jps (DOT) net>
wrote:
If anything I think Timna is part of the explination for WHY Intel has
chosen not to integrate a memory controller. The main reason why
Timna was canned was because of the integrated memory controller. The
chip was supposed to be a low-cost solution, but they integrated an
RDRAM memory control and RDRAM memory was just WAY to expensive to cut
it in the low-cost market. A wrong choice on the memory controller
meant that the chip was going to be a complete failure in it's target
market.

While it might seem logical that Intel could have just redesigned only
the memory controller portion of the chip to use DDR SDRAM instead, I
think Intel took this as a sign that integrated memory controller =
inflexible and bad (and perhaps in the case of Timna they were
right?).

In any case, I still think that at some point Intel is going to bring
their memory controller on-die. Their common Xeon/Itanium bus for
next year (or whenever it actually arrives.. if it arrives) will
pretty much require moving at least SOME of the memory controller
on-die, though they might still have a sort of generic memory bus with
interchangeable technology-specific controllers hanging off them.
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

On Feb 4, 11:22 pm, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote:
So does intel

http://intel.vendors.slashdot.org/ve.../0015236.shtml

Robert.

On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:34:04 GMT, "gaffo" <gaffo (AT) usenet (DOT) net> wrote:

If you're talking installed base, maybe. However if you're takling
new unit sales AMD bottomed out at about 4% just before teh release of
the K6 (early '97).

Just before the release of the K6 Cyrix was actually outselling AMD
(at least if you count the Cyrix branded and IBM branded chips
together).

The first Centaur Winchip came out in Oct. '97 according to
www.sandpile.org. At some point i think they might have managed to
creep over 1% of sales around early '99 or there abouts. I rather
liked this chip, VERY simple and cheap but offered not altogether
terrible performance for the time.

The Winchip design is essentially still around in the form of the VIA
C-series chips, though obviously they've diverged quite a bit since
VIA bought 'em out many moons ago.

I'm not sure that Rise ever really sold any meaningful quantities of
chips.

None of the alternatives ever matched Intel in terms of performance,
and they only matched or beat AMD at times when AMD was really
struggling (ie the K5 days). Cyrix and the IDT/Centaur/Winchip both
got bought out by VIA and that's the only real 3rd player left in x86
chips, but they're really targetting some specific niches. They still
have the VERY low cost design from Winchip so apparently they might
still be making money with their 1% marketshare, but that's about it.

Transmeta's design was a really odd-ball way of doing things that had
a lot of people scratching their heads from the get-go. I don't think
I went so far as to say that it wouldn't work out well, but I
definitely didn't have very high hopes for their idea. It turns out
that my low hopes were overly optimistic. It was just an odd-ball way
of doing things, it was a REALLY bad way of doing things! At best
they were matching the performance of VIA chips while using 4x as many
transistors and costing at least 4x as much to build!

Transmeta now seems to have taken the Rambus approach to business and
have stopped concentrating on engineering in order to focus their
efforts on litigation and questionable patents.

The Winchip-2 was a K6 equal but two years too late! By the time IDT
had much volume of their 200MHz Winchip, AMD was selling their 350MHz
K6-2. Even then the Winchip2 could only match the performance of the
K6 on integer workloads, the floating point performance was weaker
than the already so-so K6 FP.

I did like the design of the chip because it was SO cheap. It was
kind of elegant in it's simplicity, but it was never anywhere close to
the performance level that AMD or Intel offered at the time. What it
DID offer was a really good low-cost part that was a drop-in
replacement for MANY old motherboards. At they were selling this chip
there were lots of people with older Pentium 75-133MHz boards that
could drop one of these Winchips in for a VERY noticeable improvement
in performance for only ~$50. It was an EXCELLENT deal for these
people and I recommended it highly for this exact reason. However for
anyone building a new system from scratch it made no sense at all.
Only a few dollars more got you an AMD K6-2 or Intel Celeron (which
had cache by this time) based system with MUCH better performance.

AMD, like Intel, highered several old Alpha guys.

Speed increases haven't actually slowed down that much, though they
aren't necessarily as obvious anymore because most chips are "fast
enough" for so many applications. However if you look at a plot of
something like SPEC CPU2000 (and especially CPU_rate) vs. time you'll
see that the performance is still doubling every 24 months or so.
Pretty impressive.

I'm glad I don't share your pessimism for computer chip development! I
still expect noticeable performance improvements for at least another
5-10 years. Beyond that it's too tough to predict, however you can
bet that both AMD and Intel aren't going to just back and give up on
things. New performance improvements might not come from the same
sorts of obvious ways that we have seen in the past, but they aren't
going to stop.
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:31:39 GMT, "gaffo" <gaffo (AT) usenet (DOT) net> wrote:
As always, measuring the exact performance of one FPU vs. another
isn't a straightforward thing, but I don't recall any of the Winchips
ever having a particularly impressive FPU. At best they were sorta-ok
for some situations.

The very first Winchip2 was released in Sept. of '98, a month after
AMD released their K6-2 350MHz and two months before they released the
K6-2 400MHz.

The Winchip and especially Winchip2 was a nice and extremely low-cost
upgrade solution. It had a lot of good points, but it was never
anywhere close to competing with either Intel or AMD at the high-end.
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

Tony Hill wrote:

How high are they now? ;-þ

gaffo wrote:

Dirk Meyer?

Maybe, maybe not.
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?Ar...WT012707024759

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:40:11 +0100, Spoon <devnull (AT) localhost (DOT) com>
wrote:

From some of the design decisions we've seen on the Itanium (where
many of the Alpha guys ended up), I would say VERY!
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca