Is AMD going to split?

Back a few months ago there was a rumor swirling around about AMD going to a FAB Lite strategy. Meaning they would offload their FABs and outsoruce their chip fabrication. Now we never had a 100% to this rumor but it is still around and has some interesting questions arising.

My questions are:

Is AMD planning a Asset Light and Asset Smart strategy?

How will this affect the CPU market?

How will this affect the GPU market?

Where does their ATI division stand with this decision if it does come true?

Will this benefit AMD or hurt them in the long run?

I am sure there are even more questions but these are some basic ones that come to my mind. I think the most important one is the last one. Being weather or not this is a good idea in the long run. ATI had and still uses a third praty FAB, TSMC, which worked out great for them. But will it work the same for AMD? And will it benefit AMDs margins to allow them to regain profitability?

Now we still do not know 100% if the rumor is true but one thing is for sure: Hector has not left. A lot of people believe that Hector ran AMD horribly. I myself think under his management AMD has suffered more than they have benefited. Back a few months ago as well Hector left the CEO position but did not leave his position as Chairman of the Board. Now this may not seem like anything big but as Chairman of the Board he has a lot of power and according to a post on THG he is going to stay there and try to see the Asset Light and Asset Smart strategy through:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/A [...] ,6109.html

Feel free to comment but please no flaming, stupidity or fanboyism. I am sure other people have questions and hopefully they will be answered in time. And hopefully this is a move for good not bad.

AMD will not "split into two". I grow weary of seeing all the dooms day prophocies for AMD. It is just going to be outsourcing some of its resources else where. That's it. Hopefully it will mean cheaper processor in AMD's new line come Q1 of 09.

As for the GPU market... I'm pretty sure it will have no effect at all. AMD "owns" ATI, the same way that the united states is a protectorit of puerto rico. Or something like that anyway.

I really don't see how they can make that work as the Fabs would need more than just AMDs business considering that contract foundries are charged less. If you look at Chartered, AMD could get 100K chips from them for (TC) less than making them themselves.

How could the fab survive on that? And then you have to assume that they would just be trading Intel for TSMC as a competitor if they do try to make chips for others.

Moving fab of Radeon or chipsets would also be difficult as GPUs are larger and have less margin while chipsets are even worse (in terms of margins).

In other words, they would have to be trying to go out of business. But then, they did say that Dirk was misquoted and that he didn't say they were selling the fabs but were defining a revolutionary way of fabbing chips.

But then with the suicidal price war they got into who knows. The smartest thing in my mind is to push Stars cores to Griffin and pump the MHz. That would give them a 2.7GHz or so mobile chip (based on improvements noted from K10 - K10.5).

And of course, to get Opteron up to 3GHz which will pretty much kill Intel on the 4P side and perhaps even 2P considering the records they're setting with K10 only at 2.5GHz. Please no Nehalem comments. MP won't show up until late next year last I heard. By then AMD should have at least HighK if not preparing for metal gates. It was said earlier this year that they would implement HighK first (D0) and then metal gates (E0). Shanghai is C0.

So basically, it's highly doubtful that a spin off would help or is even planned.

You are more than likely turpit.

My only real question is how will this affect AMDs CPUs if they do go with a outsourcing strategy for their CPUs.

Good points.

Considering that you *can't* do highK *without* a metal gate (or a gate with some other different fermi energy), you've heard wrong.

I thought only good companies slit?

Further demonstrates how little he knows in fabrication technology.

It's a question of perception. Most consider anything with a higher resistance than standard gate dielectric to be high K.
Most fabs are using nitrogen to effect this at present.
Nitrided oxides are not as effective, but they fit the bill.
AMD (and Baron) is not really wrong, just slightly.

^I know.

I noticed that threads that are important or about a companies future tend to not get any attention and ones that tend to end in flame wars get a lot of attention.

And Elves, they split too....

"Sargeant, bring me another Elf, this one split!"

And the other super metal nonamium.

That was the word. I'm not a CPU engr so I couldn't say. I do remember that AMD wil do gate first with metal so it's possible they can do HiK without. Again, I'm speculating based on AMD statements. I'll see if I can find the link.

TSMC has already qualified their SOI process for 40nm and their SiGe process is also ready for 40nm. The thing about the first Fusion will be the MCM. Later on the GPU will just become the North Bridge, but before then Radeon has to move to SOI. Of course only the APUs will get SOI and I would assume the rest would stay bulk.

The beauty of AMDs arch is that all thats needed is an HT3 tunnel to PCIe. I don't know if it would be efficient to forego the tunnel when they're on the same chip though.

This would make a kewl name for a character in WOW

Thread : Is AMD going to split?

MHO ....

If there is anything more than 'smoke' to this I don't think a 'split' would be functional or 'technically' operational in nature.

I will guess that there is little to this other than a legal reasoning to the establishment of a wholly-owned operating subsidiary of the 'parent company' AMD.

One thing I'm certain of ... they have paid a bunch of lawyers a boat load of money to set up something like this for regulatory, legal and tax purposes ...

You know, during the Clinton era, the DoD was downsizing. Downsizing is a such a negative phrase though.......sounds wrong, like your losing something you may not want to lose. Makes voters unhappy, which makes politicians unhappy, which makes DoD unhappy. Interestingly, DoD changed its phrase to 'Right-sizing'. Sounds much better, like your keeping everything you need, but not that which you dont. In reality, nothing about the 're-sizing' changed but the word used to describe it.

"Asset Lite" to "Asset Smart". Hmmmmm......

Thanks for the info ... that is an area I know little about and it is very interesting.

Why didn't you just get Jack to post it ... LOL.

Jack lost his tongue ... er fingers??

I SAID I WASN'T A CPU ENGR!

The articles I linked to implied that High K dielectrics do not depend on metal gates, but perhaps metal gates need High K dielectrics. Even the pic you posted showed the dielectric as a separate layer. You should really get a life. Being annoying isn't a skill.

BTW, wasn't that name supposed to be stricken from the forum?

Is passing incorrect/incomplete/out of context information a skill?

If you're not an EE, I don't know what EE is...