arstechnica.com — Reports are surfacing that AMD is seriously considering a move out of the chip fabrication business, focusing its efforts entirely on chip design. It would be a risky move on AMD's part, even if it would ameliorate some of the company's cash flow problems.
Jun 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJun 20, 2007
AMD? wassat?AssMoronDiggers.
mooferJun 20, 2007
Relax. All of the fabs are overseas now anyhow. No major semiconductor manufacturing takes place outside of the far-east. If they go think-tank, and farm out the manufacturing, it'll probably only do nothing but help their bottom line. Do you have any idea how much money it takes to construct and maintain a wafer-fab? All of these fabs build-to-suit. if they don't respond, you take your money to their competitor, which can build the part for .04% cheaper per part.
maninblac1Jun 20, 2007
IBM would probably take their spot.
johnisfatJun 20, 2007
AMD needs to keep the pressure on Intel otherwise we will end up with a new generation of the p4 processor.
maninblac1Jun 20, 2007
I'm not sure that moving to outsourced fab would give AMD a leg up, since the funds needed to run outsourcing fabs is mostly upfront costs, in onhand cash. 33% of AMD's networth is their fabrication. Even if they were to sell the fabs to willing buyers at full price, they'd still only have half of the on hand cash that intel has, and no fabs of their own. Give you an Idea of how costly it is to redevelope and die shrink at the time. Intel in Q4'05 had 11 billion dollars in cash on hand, this discounts of course the 13 billion they had in Q1'05 when the Core architecture took full swing, it cost intel 2 billion dollors to develope it, costing it roughly a billion dollars every quarter in R&D extra than normal. After which they had to invest in building new fabs and ramping up production between Q4'05 and Q2'06, at which intel only had 6.5 billion dollars in cash on hand.Let me say this clearly, The core micro architecture cost intel roughly 7 billion dollars to put into full scale production, sure alot of that is fabrication construction, but 45nm and 65nm fabs don't just magically appear elsewhere so that people can produce random VLSI chips. AMD will have to drop significant amounts of money too, but AMD simply doesn't have that kind of money on hand, they don't have the kind of money needed to do a massive transition like that. This of course is only excentuated by the fact that Intel had awesome quarters in '05 with lots of margin on their revenue.Hands down this will only make AMD weaker.
tabrisJun 20, 2007
You forgot "/sarcasm" and are thus dugg down.Unless you were being serious, but I am a just god and give you the benefit of the doubt.
maninblac1Jun 21, 2007
Absolutely, IBM itself would likely never start on x86, but it would hugely advantageous to, gather an ally with the same interests, dethroning Intel from market dominance. Both intel and AMD are competitors in the server business as well. And the enemy of your bigger enemy is your friend.