Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Process Boy who wrote (87028)	1/14/2000 12:29:00 AM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1572373

PB, re:<excuses for slow 0.18 conversion at Intel> except that only one fab to convert is a whole 'nother animal frm opening two brand new plants and converting several others, especially the new plants. - concerning opening two new plants: AMD is in the process of opening one new plant and its 10X smaller, to the "opening new plants" applies 5 times as much to AMD, but AMD converted to 0.18 in 3 months - concerning Intel converting multiple plants simultaneously: do Intel workers commute from one plant to another? Doesn't Intel have 10X the employees and 10X the resources of AMD? Aren't they supposed to "copy exactly" at each plant, so they don't need 10 different conversion plans? There's virtually no way to shove equipment in and get it qualified any faster. And you certainly don't wait to start producing in these new plants until you get all the equipment up and running. That's expensive. How does shoving equipment in and out of Hillsborough affect shoving in Sunnyvale? On thats expensive -- again, Intel's cash available per fab is much higher than AMD, which converted in 3 months. One valid reason for a slower conversion you did not bring up is the inability of the equipment industry to supply the equipment within a three month period. Other possible reasons include: 1. Intel wanting to delay 0.13. There could be 2 reasons for this a. wanting to convert to 12" wafers at the same time b. fear that Intel's copper 0.13 process will not be ready yet 2. Belief by Intel that the 0.18 process requires additional tweaking to improve yields or reduce MHz variance. 3. Perhaps the CuMine 128 is not ready for full production, therefore the lifetime of the existing Celeron is being extended 4. In 2H'00 Intel will be converting fabs to produce Itanium and (presumably) Willamette. They can perhaps save significant money (and downtime?) if they don't first convert these fabs to Coppermine 0.18 production. Petz