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

To: kash johal who wrote (38037)	5/2/2001 1:03:15 AM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

As far as UMC. UMC has Cu and they have work ongoing with IBM. UMC already does foundry for AMD on chipsets. I think UMC will be gearing to supply 20% of AMD needs in 2002/2003. They will likely build durons/morgans etc there would be my guess. This .13um joint UMC/IBM/Infineon bulk foundry process is very good but I don't believe it's quite (but close) as good as IBM's internal .13um bulk process. In addition, the foundry process doesn't offer local interconnect (needed on all AMD designs) so UMC must have picked that up either by themselves or thru IBM. Both UMC and TSMC are rapidly approaching the process capability of the leaders and in my opinion will soon have very near equal processing abilities. THE WATSONYOUTH

To: kash johal who wrote (38037)	5/2/2001 1:29:54 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

re: I dont buy the SOI argument Do you mean that you don't believe getting SOI to work on 0.13u is the gating item for the Hammers? Well, I think we've seen some evidence that AMD initially intended to use the Moto process, and I think the reason Clawhammer was supposed to preceed Sledgehammer in all the roadmaps is because it was not going to use SOI in its first implementation. When we first heard about Clawhammer, it was supposed to preceed Sledgehammer by a considerable amount of time and we knew nothing about the process technology to be used. (0.18? 0.13? SOI or bulk?) Now we know that Clawhammer will actually use the same process technology as Sledgehammer and, all of a sudden, they are both coming out much closer together in time. I think that proves that the primary gating item is the process technology. I don't consider that an excuse or a sign of weakness, but a statement of fact. AMD may have started with Motorola and found the IBM's process was either significantly higher in performance or that Motorola's had too high a risk of failure. The design may have slipped some, making a non-SOI Clawhammer too late to be useful. Why expend the effort to make a chip using bulk-Si when SOI will be ready 3 months later? Petz