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

To: Elmer Phud who wrote (264439)	8/25/2010 4:45:00 PM
From: jackthetab	Respond to of 275872

Re:"A more curious question is why AMD didn't bring ATI products into their own fabs more quickly. Perhaps they didn't have a viable non-SOI process to run it on but it's been obvious for quite some time they would have one at 32nm so what was the holdup? Engineering resources at AMD? Doesn't GF provide the porting? That should have been the plan from the start I would think. The more product run at GF the closer they will be to break even or even profitability." All good questions and I'll ignore the last two points as they are incorrect, but you're entitled to your opinion. I can only offer conjecture, but I don't believe they had the capacity at the time while they were hamstrung with 65 and 45nm, which we all know didn't transition that great. While they were figuring that out, bringing up bulk would have just added to the issues. They may have also used a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach as the TSMC relationship worked favorably or at least was the least of their problems at the time. Also, their contract with TSMC may have been a challenge. Personally, I believe it is only now an inflection point has been reached where the cost per wafer is is low enough at GF to make it a viable alternative to TSMC and the ROI on capital investment attractive to divert manufacture on gpus which have less margin. Perhaps GF does not currently have enough customers to max out their runs and ATI gpus would fit nicely. Perhaps, as mentioned previously, its just talk to get TSMC to prioritize ATI's chips over nVidias. I don't have insight to TSMC and the factors there to know, but if only recently 32nm is coming on line at GF, then when would it have been favorable to consider switching until now considering some of the possible scenarios above? If 32nm comes on line in the near term, and your pessimism has been well recorded, GF should have the excess capacity to absorb at least part of TSMC runs until Fab2 gets up to absorb it all.