David, All,
Thanks for your very balanced view of things. You make good points, I think. Concerning DRAM manufacturing, I have one other question that I am less sure of. Please bear with me... because I'm disorganized this morning (as usual).
Okay, I'm MU. I make DRAM chips... Once upon a time, I made 4MB DRAM chips with my available fab real estate; this has since changed to 16MB. I am in the process of converting to 64MB chips. So, "out the door" goes my 16MB capacity and in its place comes 64MB. Before, I could make 21 million 16MB chips per quarter (I pulled this number partly from thin air and partly from Intel's numbers, because I don't have MU's numbers handy). How does this figure (pulled for example purposes only... I know it's not real) compare with my capacity to build 64MB chips? Restated, do I now have the ability/capacity to make 21 million 64MB chips per quarter or half of this figure or what?
For this example, let's assume that MU is "standing alone" without its recent Texas Instrument acquisition. IOW, we are pretending the TI thing hasn't happened.
I know this whole silly thing sounds elementary, but I still would love to know the answer to this question.
Thanks,
Teri |
