wbmw,
Re: capital spending
I don't think AMD gave a break down on where it will go. There are 3 areas: Dresden, Austin (conversion to flash) and FASL. 4th emerging one will be the UMC joint venture.
I doubt a huge prortion of it will go to Dresden, especially after reading your quote about being af full wafer start capacity in Dresden.
You seem to be under the impression that AMD had 40% (or at least a large percentage) of their Dresden fab equipped with 130nm manufacturing devices.
I didn't say anything about a percentage. I just found TWY's theory (that some 30-40% of Dresden fab was not processing .18u wafers) plausible. They were putting in place .13u capacity. Whether all of it is online and in production, I have no idea, but AMD spokesmen said that the crossover (from .18u to .13u would be in Q2). Since we are in Q1, we are somewhere between > 0% but < 50%
It sounds to me like AMD really hasn't purchased much of the equipment that they need, and thus will be spending $850M throughout the year to acquire this equipment. Therefore, I believe that Dresden's 5,000 wspw were manufacturing Palomino and Athlon chips, but only slightly more than 7.8M die were produced for the quarter. The rest that weren't sold went into inventory. This means that AMD's yields are less than stellar
I have no idea about yields, there are way too many variables out there for even a ballpark figure. We don't know how may wafers the Q4 output was based on, we don't know what the output was. We don't know what portion of the output was from Dresden vs. Austin (it is unclear if mobile Duron is from Austin or Dresden. We don't know if AMD made more than sold or sold more than made. Inventory went down, that is, the sum of flash and CPUs went down, but we don't know about flash and CPU contribution.
On inventory, I think the target was to reduce inventory of Thunderbird and Spitfire chips, I hope it was successful, desktop XP was most likely in short supply, because running too many wafers of the brand new core would not have been prudent. Morgan Durons probably increased, since that's where the sales shortfall vs. expectation concentrated. On .13u parts, I think inventory was negligible, with some Tbred notebook chips
Going to Q1, desktop CPUs will be entirely XP, there will be Tbred notebook and MP chips, replacing Palomino chips. By the end of the quarter, mobile Palomino should be limited only to some Morgan. Toward the end of the quarter, some capacity will be converted from Palomino XP to Tbred.
Joe |
