GrizzledAdams

Hi, I'm so glad you are on! I am an armchair enthusiast on the subject, as I grew up watching the duel between Intel and AMD (and NVIDIA and ATI/AMD). The work you do has been as inspiring to me as the space race, although its not quite as glamorized in the public. Thank you for the hard work, and VERY god job on all the processors you guys have been putting out. Thank your colleagues for me!

I do have some questions: [Please answer as many as you have time for. No need to do it all in one response!]

1. How well do you think journalists (Anandtech in particular) cover your latest architecture? It seems to go over a majority of the tech-news writers' heads...
2. When journalists attempt to pry into your CPUs to determine some undisclosed facts that you never released, how often do they hit the nail on the head? Is withholding this information from them just a cat and mouse game?
3. Where do you read your tech news?
4. Are you worried at all about reverse engineering efforts by competitors (ie is this common in your field)? Are protection mechanisms designed at the manufacturing/materials level or logical/layout level?
5. Was Global Foundary's split from AMD a wise move? Purchase of ATI wise?
6. Pentium 4 era was obviously a cluster-f. Interesting enough, AMD has started to wander down this path in their latest processors -- hoping to get to higher frequencies with longer pipelines. There has to be SOME technical justification for AMD to 'repeat' the past's mistakes. What technical detail is elusively close yet fails to be reached time and again?
7. How many transistors/gates are hand-laid vs computer synthesized on a modern processor? Old Pentium Pro era videos shown at colleges indicated a heavy reliance on manual design for large sections, although I assume this isn't the case anymore.
8. Would an undergraduate EE have any possibility of an interview? Or is a Master essentially required?

Thank you very much for your time! It would make my Christmas to hear a response.