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To: combjelly who wrote (63395)	11/11/2001 10:26:31 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 275872

combjelly. It looks like a possible parallel universe could ensue. Now that Intel has broken the pin for pin drop in pathway there can no longer be hope for AMD to get a share of the same mobo sockets. A new mobo and hence new product line are inevitable and that leave the maker open to coercion of the type Intel has misued so often before. It is of course quite possible for a same shaped mobo to be made for both AMD and Intel parts and that would leave the maker free to switch with less aggravation. usually major OEMs have made their mobos funny shaped to forestall any possible upgrade pathway for the buyer. This will result in an inevitable path on the part of AMD towards more vertical integration in chipsets and that could be the thought behind the UMC partnering. As the assorted north/southbridges and video parts get smaller and more integrated they become integrable into the CPU, esp as features sizes allow banks of video memory to also be made on the CPU. Now what form this will take? beats me, possible deals with Nvidea come to mind as Intel beds down with ATI. Now at .07 memory cell size how much real estate is needed to make a Nvidea video card on the CPU or on the chipset with 8-32 meg of memory? A grand convergence is occurring and as the path narrows more and more people will get pushed off this path if they are not part of an alliance. A deal with UMC will suit both AMD, UMC and Nvidea. How far will this go? beats me? Perhaps one day you will have it all built into a wall adapter with an RF firewire LAN and you place the independent keyboard, pointing device(eye track based, of course), flat screen monitor, extra storage, CD/DVD reader/burner, etc, all free standing, data by RF and power by wireless transmission of power to each component, all quite doable. Of course they all need more dev work...:) Bill

To: combjelly who wrote (63395)	11/11/2001 4:01:54 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

combjelly: The whole rationale behind contract fabs is that they can get their economy of scale by running lots of little jobs. So cost per die is a very important point. This is why foundry processes are tuned for yield and not performance, although, to be fair, most of their customers really don't need all that high of a performance level. This has certainly been true historically and although I still think it is to some extent, there are indications that the situation has changed in the last few years. Players like NVIDIA need top-notch manufacturing and they have become a huge portion of TSMC's business. Still&#133 How many complex logic chips do either TSMC or UMC make that run at GHz frequencies? -fyo