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

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (243170)	11/1/2007 10:17:06 AM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 275872

Is there any reason to expect that AMD is closer than 2 years behind Intel on production with MG-HK ? Hard to tell. IMHO AMD is behind by at least 1 year on this issue.AMD develops its silicon fabrication technology with IBM. IBM Research Labs has led the way in silicon process technology development for years.IBM was embarrassed when Intel early this year demoed Penryn and disclosed that it used HiK dielectrics.IBM Labs hurriedly made press releases about its own HiK development. So AMD can use the work done at IBM Labs.Unfortunately IBM Labs makes silicon in low volumes, and AMD will have to do the fine tuning needed for volume manufacturing. So my guess is that AMD is a minimum of 1 year, and most likely 2 years behind Intel on HiK manufacturing. Intel claims that Nehalem also exploits circuit design and architectural techniques which are optimized around the HiK.Penryn architecture was optimized around non-HiK processes. It remains to be seen how the Nehalem architects have pushed the performance and power envelope further. AMD will probably also have to do further learning on this front as well.