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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (152619)	12/15/2001 4:08:29 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: FAB space. It's been an interesting and enlightening discussion (what a change, eh?) One last point - as far as clean room sizes are concerned, that seems to always be a closely guarded secret, with disinformation being spread constantly by both companies. We've seen the numbers 175,000 and 200,000 for Intel's D1C, now add to that ambiguities regarding AMD's Austin FAB. If you go to the current link describing it at AMD's site they list it at between 106,000 and 107,000 sq. ft. amd.com OTOH, in this link, it's still 120,000: amd.com Bottom line? I think AMD and Intel lead the industry in yields, the two of them are fairly close in yields, and both companies are careful to not release enough information to allow anyone to be certain which is "ahead." I also think that when the raw silicon costs something like $6 to $12 to produce, (maybe a little more for P4 until it's on .13, but not a lot more) has a fixed adder for packaging and testing of something like $15, and the parts then sell for $50 to $250 (or much higher for a few parts) then whatever differences there may be aren't particularly important to the bottom line of either company. Halving or doubling yields would affect margins by about 12% for AMD and 8% for Intel (excluding capital costs, which is a whole other issue that can be saved for another time). I think that Intel is using somewhat more space than AMD per chip, but that their average die size is somewhat larger (even after averaging in a bunch of .18 and .18 PIII/Celeron die). So: (A) yields are probably quite similar, and, (B) it wouldn't matter much if they weren't!