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

To: Petz who wrote (32763)	5/18/1998 1:34:00 PM
From: Elmer	Respond to of 1571600

<BTW, if Intel needs entire Fabs just to make their SRAM's, this vastly increases their costs for Pentium II. They have to amortize $2B fab cost for making the SRAM's as well as fab for making the P2 die.> John, who said they use "entire fabs". I just said srams were a product Intel makes. You didn't comment on my point about chipsets but they probably use just as much fab capacity as processors. Flash is not produced on a logic process so they need their own fabs. The amortizing has already been done when the line was running the processors. Nothing unique to Intel there. Everyone does it that way. The processors use the state of the art process and the other products backfill the freed up capacity as the processors move to the next generation. Pretty simple. Don't you think AMD does the same thing? If not, what happens to all that .35u equipment? If there's noting to use it then no wonder AMD's costs are so high. EP

To: Petz who wrote (32763)	5/18/1998 3:40:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571600

Petz - Re: ". They have to amortize $2B fab cost for making the SRAM's as well as fab for making the P2 die." You just have no understanding of the business! Intel is using their 0.35 micron process lines to manufacture the 450 MHz SRAMS used for the Pentium Xeon. These lines have been in production since mid 1995, and have been cranking out Pentium/Pentium MMX and Pentium II's. Thus, they are 75% or more DEPRECIATED! Using them to produce state-of-the-art SRAMs allows Intel to use plant and capacity that is already in place, fully functional, running EXCEPTIONALLY HIGH YIELDS! Result - very cost effective SRAMs! AMD, on the other hand, has to obsolete a lot of their 0.35 micron equipment since they have nothing else to run on it! They did the same thing with their original 0.5 micron process in Fab 25. Paul