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

To: hmaly who wrote (113887)	6/2/2000 10:57:00 AM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573532

Re: "EP, one of the arguments you have made lately is that it has taken way too long to build the fab. Isn't it quite possible that AMD was establishing a baseline during the time you were complaining about. Maybe the stated reason for bringing Dresden online (not wanting to start paying loans and taxes) was just a ruse to give AMD enough time to validate .13 process in copper" Lots of questions here rolled up into one. Anything is possible but I don't think it's likely. AMD wouldn't have produced 10s of thousands of wafers that would have been necessary to establish a manufacturing baseline for their new process. Just too expensive. With no pressure from Intel to release a higher speed product, I don't think AMD would be so foolish as to announce a 1.5 GHz part. Re: "Secondly as far as I know the manufacturing equipment installed there was capable of .13 at the get go, so why is it impossible to believe that at least some of the T-birds are indeed .13 um and are capable of 1.5 ghz, just like the german article states" It's not impossible that some run at that speed. But we're talking about productizing a 1.5GHz part. Does AMD want to run the risk of announcing a product and then look foolish when they can't deliver? Remind you of anyone? Haven't they done a pretty good job of casting off that image and now you think they want to take that chance? What's to be gained? BTW, .18 & .13 don't mean much anymore. Intel's .18u process had .13 gates from the getgo. Re: "Thirdly, AMD's stated roadmap of building all chips in Dresden and building flash in Austin (another thing you were complaining about) has changed to building T-birds in both Dresden and Austin and doing Durons in Austin; and building another flash plant with fasl.. Why the need for all of this capacity if the T-bird is a mediocre chip? At only 600 wpw and 150 chips/wafer, amd could produce 1.2 million chips /quarter in Dresden alone. At 2000 wpw, AMD could produce 4 mil. chips/q, which is 2 - 3 times current sales,and to get those sales without drastically killing prices, T-bird would have to be a blockbuster. That is the only thing that makes sense, and I am betting heavily on it." Good luck. EP