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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (442646)	12/26/2008 7:18:47 AM
From: Taro	Respond to of 1576858

Actually it has been claimed by some 'experts' that considering all that big money, which has been invested in the semiconductor industry since it's incision back in the 50s, it seems very doubtful if the industry as such has even turned a profit. So why going on investing in such an industry? Because first of all it has made many individuals rich and some of them dirt rich. Furthermore, without it your iPhone would never have been born. Taro

To: bentway who wrote (442646)	12/26/2008 11:33:23 AM
From: Alighieri	Respond to of 1576858

I've never gotten that Al. It seems like, if no one made money on DRAM's, no one would make them. Isn't it more a case of one low cost producer being undercut to unprofitability by the next lower cost producer? It's a sort of model for the entire global manufacturing system of commodity products. I think eventually, all our DRAMs will come from enslaved children in Angola. You go into it thinking you can make money, then market dynamics change, time to money moves out and pretty soon you are caught into a self fulfilling spiral, whereby you've invested a lot of money in the fabs and in process development...at IBM we did make money eventually by licensing deep recess process to Infineon and Toshiba. Korean manufacturers started in the business with a stacked capacitor process we thought could not be extended to high density and high performance memories...we were wrong. Al