AMD did it again !!

  • Thread starter Thread starter JimS
  • Start date Start date
J

JimS

One of the problems with IC's is that there is a significant capacitance to
the silicon substrate caused by the reverse biased junctions that occur
naturally when defusing transistors into a silicon wafer. Up till now any
speed increases came from reducing the minimum feature size.

For years the industry struggled with SOS ( silicon on sapphire ) and some
expensive high frequency transistors use the technology.

AMD developed and brought to production SOI ( silicon on Insulator ). The 64
bit Claw Hammer uses a 0.13 minimum feature size and SOI .

The bad news is that the first AMD chip set ( the 8000 set ) still uses the
current, but now legacy PCI 2.x bus,
The good news is that the AMD 8133 does address PCI-X ( 64 bits ).

Maybe the world isn't ready for the wider and faster PCI-X.

This might explain why Microsoft jumped in bed with AMD with ADB.

JPS
 
Back
Top