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

To: Dan3 who wrote (236947)	7/24/2007 11:32:08 AM
From: neolib	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

Anyone on this board care to hazard how long it would take AMD to take a fully functional SOI design and port it to a bulk process? Is this more or less work than taking the same design and porting to a new node (say 65nm -> 45nm)? Are either of these processes nearly automated, or is there a large amount of hand tweaking that must still take place? Is the time lag mostly driven by man-hours or compute time? TIA!

To: Dan3 who wrote (236947)	7/24/2007 11:48:46 AM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. today announced that it would complete 45nm technology qualification and enter production as early as September 2007. ... >> If they're going to be in production of parts for their customers this quarter, it would be surprising if there weren't samples starting to make it to those customers around now. Sorry, Dan. When a foundry discusses going to production, they mean that their lines become qualified for their partners to start taping out products. By your own links, the earliest anyone can tape out a design is September, meaning that samples won't be available until November or December. Again, "at the earliest". Of course, historically, neither AMD, nor nVidia, nor even ATI have had designs ready when TSMC has first started their ramp. FPGA designs are usually the first, since they require the least amount of front end work. Also, they take advantage of TSMC's back end design services, which allow them to be at the forefront of new process nodes. AMD is just starting to ramp ATI 65nm products, and 55nm won't be announced until later in the year. 45nm is still quite a long ways off for GPUs, let alone hypothetical bulk AMD CPUs....