To: kpf who wrote (219910 ) 12/10/2006 12:03:47 PM From: economaniack Read Replies (1) | Respond to kpf, unraveling the subsidies available to both AMD and Intel is an undertaking beyond my current time constraints, I suppose it is possible that AMD gets a lot more than Intel percentage wise. It has long been the case that gov't planners view semiconductors as desirable industries both strategically and for the employment they bring and are willing to pay for those benefits. I'm not sure that impacts on the numbers I offered, or where you think I went wrong. If AMD can share the costs of process development then they don't have to bear the full cost themselves and it doesn't impact scale economies. Doesn't matter why they can avoid the full cost, only that they do. I suppose you could look at the whole semi industry and argue that efficient scale in process development supports only two players, currently Intel and everyone else. I suppose that IBM could decide not to lead the consortium effort and try and establish themselves as a duopoly with Intel, but that would be beyond the scope of the present analysis. The fact is that nearly all the non-Intel world does manage to share development costs and that allows them to largely offset any scale advantage that Intel would otherwise have from that source.
