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

To: dougSF30 who wrote (199326)	5/29/2006 8:38:54 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

More details from Ace's poster on 65nm troubles: They are researchers, so they have been working with AMD (and Intel, among others). AMD was asking them for helps on 65nm. This action by itself actually is quite normal, but based on my friends' descriptions, it seemed that everyone in the circle knew AMD messed up 65nm big time, and at that time, no ones knew when the problem would be solved. aceshardware.com

To: dougSF30 who wrote (199326)	5/29/2006 9:45:21 PM
From: j3pflynn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Doug - So, an anonymous poster who suddenly pops up on Ace's 2 weeks ago is your authority?

To: dougSF30 who wrote (199326)	5/30/2006 12:34:26 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: 65nm troubles at AMD? Well, anything is possible. However it might be worth pointing out that AMD is continuing to ship faster, cooler, better parts than Intel, while using cheap, easy 90nm FAB equipment while Intel's inferior, market share losing parts have been produced using expensive, difficult, 65nm FAB equipment. It does look like Intel's 65nm will finally catch up to AMD's 90nm in a quarter or two. Until that time comes, it would have been stupid for AMD to have fooled around with a bleeding edge process. Not when AMD has needed nothing more than "more of the same" and the chance to get its balance sheet in order. Intriguingly, AMD has chosen to work with its partners to put into place a new platform that can support chips with more than twice the memory demands (twice the memory bandwidth) compared to their current chips. Does AMD have parts ready to move to manufacturing that will challenge that new platform or was it just a pointless exercise? We simply don't know. Will AMD have better parts available in the next couple of quarters? Of course they will. Will the improvements seen by AMD be as great as the ones seen by Intel? We'll find out. Judging by the part numbers they're offering up, Intel's binsplits make it look like their 65nm process is pretty random - they're seeing more variation in their process than we've been used to seeing. Maybe it's just a marketing move or maybe they're having process consistency issues. Remember when AMD could produce a couple of world beating K6-III parts from each wafer? Plus a handful more that didn't clock worth a darn and a load of bad die? Remember when Intel convinced everyone that the PIII was going to max out at 733mhz on 180nm with the Q4 product listings? Geez, I was telling Paul Engel that the PIII clocks would be better than that! Then they shipped up to 800mhz in volume by the end of the year and were at 933mhz a few months after that. You can have a great chip and a somewhat working process that isn't good enough and the weirdly wide band for the launch speeds of Conroe etc. are something of a surprise. Dropping the max speed down to 3ghz while raising power requirements at the last minute to 85W from 65W is equally interesting. AMD has been very, very, quiet about what parts they have coming up, but their pace of production capacity increases makes it clear that they expect to have a lot of demand for next year's chips.