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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yougang Xiao who wrote (63793)	6/30/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: grok	Respond to of 1575535

RE: <Via/Natsemi will replace AMD as Intel's enemy #1. Less heat for AMD, in terms of relationship with Intel.> You may have something here. If Via replaces AMD as the chief lowend bleeder they can tie down some of Intel's resources and mindshare into hammering Via. AMD then transitions totally out of lowend and has slightly less opposition from Intel since Intel has to spend ~5% of their resources driving Via and NSM into bankruptcy. And since Via seems to have friends with deep pockets this may take a while.

To: Yougang Xiao who wrote (63793)	6/30/1999 1:44:00 PM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575535

Yougang, <Chuck, Please notice the section in the press release "Further details on the timing and structure of the transaction will be announced during the next month. VIA intends to continue to develop and market the successful line of Cyrix CPUs." > Yup, I noticed that. The best I can tell, this is a 3-way deal - NSM/VIA/TSMC - and until the fab and IP issues are fully resolved we may not get the full details. From what I gather NSM's South Portland fab is very close to TSMC 0.25 micron - it was apparently planned that way and Cyrix has apparently seen silicon from TSMC a while back on their x86 stuff (MII would be my guess - this was done in the days when they thought capacity from South Portland fab was going to be insufficient and they didn't want to depend on IBM) NSM never really had the chance to ramp the 0.25 process before the pricing pressures hit them. Halla wanted to run away from the whole x86 biz because of the investment necessary to put in competitive 180nm process specially when sales were plunging. With TSMC, that is not a problem. Also, it looks like there has been some maturity of the 0.25u process in the recent past and there have been rumors of reasonable speed grades. Well, we will see the details pretty soon. Let's see. Chuck