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Re: Single chip intel based computers

From: John Flanagan <>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 01:41:55 -0600

At 12:53 AM 11/30/98 -0600, Greg Teiber wrote:
>Forget the '040......... the '060 is out :)  And I don't see why it would
be so difficult to just put stock traces and stock chips on a Large Hunk of
Sillicon.  Sorta like the 512k onboard wiht the PPro.  I think the hardest
part woudl be lowereing the power consumption of the '040-'060 series.
They do requie Heatsinks, even at the 33mhz level.  I guess it's time to
start petitioning Motorolla :)

Lotsa problems besides power consumption.

1) A very important consideration for full-fledged CPUs is the number of
pins available.  Every feature that you tack onto the chip is more pins
that have to come out of the package.  This causes more problems than you'd
think.

2) The reason that the PPro never really took off was because it was
*expensive*.  The bigger your die size, the lower your dies-per-wafer, and
the lower your yield (because larger dies have more room for mistakes).
Doubling die size will cut dies-per-wafer by *more* than half (due to
edge-of-wafer lossage), and will also roughly double your yield loss (which
if you have high yield isn't so bad, but if you have low yield to begin
with, you're hosed).

3) Concentration of heat.  All that stuff you throw onto that single chip
will be producing heat in one place, rather than being scattered around.
This will aggravate heat problems.

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