Re: AMD's "investment" was 0.18u, not 0.13
Dresden was built to take AMD to .10 or .07 - they don't need a new FAB (other than for expansion) for 4 to 6 years. Why does Intel have to keep buying land, putting in qualified water and power, and building shells over and over again? It's like they revel in pissing away money.
"pod" capability has been built into every lead intel Fab since 0.25u
I'd be interested in some backup for that statement. Recently, they were raving about their innovative new PODs to be used with 12" wafers, claiming that PODs were needed only for larger wafers (though I can't find a link for that, either).
Most of that Asian Capacity is in commodity chips, and chipsets, which intel can counter with their remaining 0.25u Fabs, and later on, when P859 gets rolling, the 0.18u Fabs
Well, that was pretty much my point. Their one generation old technology faces much tougher competition than has historically been the case - which will make it hard to earn the $17 Billion they need to depreciate that old plant and equipment.
P4's upcoming 0.13u "Northwood" introduction, should fix all of the complaints about the 0.18u P4 version. Whatever money Itanium makes in the marketplace will just be "profit gravy", the penetration again, paving the way for 0.13u McKinley version.
We'll see; they sure have been wet squabs so far. And the .13 Itanium's are Madison and Deerfield, but I know what you meant.
I think that AMD has been riding the "Athlon" coattails" a bit too far
Everyone's entitled to their opinion. So far, Athlon has been doing for AMD what the PPro/Pentium II/III core did for Intel. And AMD's next major core is (they hope) less than a year away.
So far, it seems that Athlon SMP is not seeing wide availability OR acceptance, and the whole DDR Memory Hype, has been a bust.
You're being generous. SMP from AMD has seen zero availability so far, and there's no way they're going to make a dime with it in the near term server market, but they will get their foot in the door.
OTOH, DDR offers the 5% performance benefit at zero cost penalty that SDRAM offered over EDO RAM - and that EDO offered over Fast Page Mode. My conclusion is that AMD made a great move going with DDR, and that RDRAM has been a nightmare for Intel.
Dan |
