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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (215184)	10/27/2006 11:15:06 AM
From: eracer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: It's not so simple. Even if SOI increased frequencies by a modest 10% or optimistic 20%, it would not pay for NVidia to redesign their chips for SOI, since IBM can't make all the GPUs NVidia needs. Having 2 substantially different layouts for 2 fabs would not be an efficient way for NVidia to operate. However, it makes a lot of sense for ATI to start working on SOI parts, since it is a requirement for Fusion, and also, it will allow use of in-house fabrication of GPUs. It may be likely that ATI will move to Chartered / IBM to fab the chips, if TSMC can't do SOI. This was my point. There are some modest/moderate gains to be made in clock speed and/or reduced power consumption by moving to SOI. The potential gains were never large enough to consider moving GPU production to SOI. I do not believe it is reasonable to assume AMD could be making 1.3GHz 90-nm SOI X1950XTX GPUs now because TSMC is "only" making X1950XTX 90-nm GPUs at 650MHz.