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To: Dan3 who wrote (141406)	8/12/2001 7:57:44 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

IBM for decades wouldn't sell any of their bleeding edge technology from their semiconductor or disk drive divisions to anybody, much less to a competitor. While they were coming out of their big losses period in the early 90s, they changed strategy completely, to one of selling anything to anybody, even their fiercest competitor. Gerstner has been accused of being the type to sell his mother if he could get a good profit out of it. This was to make sure they stayed strongly in the black, not having liked losing money for probably their first time ever. Since that change in strategy, they've hyped several technologies like a flasher on the street showing watches (fooled ya). They took Cyrix and AMD in as foundry customers and fleeced them real good. Now, they'll probably sell AMD the mediocre grade SOI, while keeping the good stuff (if there is such a thing) to themselves. I'll take in-house technology development and decision making, when the company has 30+ years doing it, like Intel, over being a "whattaya got today Mister IBM, SIR", lapdog like AMD. TV

To: Dan3 who wrote (141406)	8/12/2001 8:01:26 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Dan, Re: "What would you be thinking if IBM, Intel, and Motorola were all moving to SOI, while AMD, TI, and the commodity Taiwan FABs had only bulk silicon?" That would depend. Would AMD claim that they investigated the benefits of SOI, and that they decided that their process was already good enough to do without it? In that case, I would be willing to give AMD the benefit of the doubt, unless products based on their 130nm process showed up seriously behind the rest. wanna_bmw

To: Dan3 who wrote (141406)	8/12/2001 9:19:24 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 186894

Dan, <What would you be thinking if IBM, Intel, and Motorola were all moving to SOI, while AMD, TI, and the commodity Taiwan FABs had only bulk silicon?> I'm no process expert, so my opinions are shaped by those I can trust. My current view is that SOI is one of those things which will provide tangible benefits, but it will cost more, especially in terms of lower yield. It's kind of like the old debates over AMD's use of local interconnect. It allowed AMD to get better transistor densities and smaller die sizes at the same process level. But it also lowered yields, and it wasn't clear whether the benefits were worth it. Like I said, I'm no process expert, so take my opinions for what they're worth. On the other hand, I'll bet a lot of SOI cheerleaders are no process experts, either. Tenchusatsu