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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (23134)	12/21/2000 3:09:15 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: I seriously doubt if the incremental value of the additional revenues from 1.1/1.2GHz shipments overcomes the expense of second fab ... Your point is well taken except that I don't think AMD gets a lot of 1GHZ Thunderbirds out of Austin. The slightly smaller Duron core is probably OK for 1GHZ in .18 Aluminum, but it seems to take the somewhat better .18 copper process to allow AMD to have a GHZ+ sweet spot. Their sweet spot for Aluminum thunderbirds looks like it's around 900MHZ - pretty close to Intel's sweet spot for coppermine (after Intel's last stepping that shrank the die and improved binsplits). Remember how accurate Intel was about copper not helping at .18? I wonder if they'll be just as correct about SOI on .13. I think that marginal increase from just below 1GHZ to just above it has been important for AMD ASPs and image. Having a second FAB has got to give customers more confidence in AMD's reliability as a supplier, too. If AMD doesn't need both FABs for CPUs, they can accelerate the planned conversion of Austin to Flash production as soon as Dresden is ramped up. Flash demand still looks OK for some time - all those gadgets people are buying instead of PCs use flash. I think Dresden has turned out pretty well. I also think the jury's still out on needed AMD FAB space. Let's see how they do when they aren't operating with a $50 platform handicap. Regards, Dan