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

To: greg s who wrote (160910)	3/2/2002 4:29:33 PM
From: dale_laroy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

>AMD, of course, is playing a risky game. Its Athlon XP and Clawhammer chips are made in Dresden. It's a top notch fabrication plant but it won't be for some time that AMD will open its second state of the art fab in Singapore. It therefore has all of its CPU eggs in one basket and if anything should go wrong at Fab 30 in Dresden, AMD would find itself well and truly kippered, while Intel would be able to just switch the taps on, if one of its Pentium 4 fabs got skewered ... ... There's a limit to the number of chips AMD can churn out given its reliance on one fabrication plant for the whole of this year and next, so it has to play a careful game and not overgenerate demand for its Clawhammer and Sledgehammer microprocessors.< What AMD is not revealing is that their "pilot" 300mm wafer line installed in leased floor space at Fab12a (originally planned for UMCi but diverted now that UMC is likely to postpone equipping UMCi indefinitely), will ramp to a run rate of 2000 300mm wafers per week beginning in H2 2003 using 193nm laser lithography equipment. The only 90nm processors coming out of Fab30 in 2003, and probably H1 2004, will be MP and mobile Hammers produced using the installed 193nm laser lithography test equipment. In 2004, the 193nm lithography tools at Fab12a will make the transition to the 75nm node, while Fab30 makes the transition to the 90nm node using 248nm laser lithography tools. In the mean time, all Athlon/Duron production will be outsourced to UMC. >It is something of a tribute to AMD's skill that it has been able to get the Hammer family out of the door so quickly, in relative terms. Because of that accomplishment, it can also brag loudly about how much further it is along the path than La Intella. But it had better not brag too loudly, we think. The one big difference between AMD and Intel is that the latter puts a heap of dollars into research and development. AMD, on the other hand, while it has managed to beat Intel in various ways and through various means, may also find it needs to emulate its bigger brother in the next two or three years to come, and plunge considerable money into R&D.< I suppose AMD's lack of R&D accounts for the disparity of patents issued to AMD versus Intel. BTW, my comments about AMD's pilot production line at pure bull.