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AMD: Take financial analysts with a pinch of salt |
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Jul 09, 2007 at 05:45 PM |
The rumors of an imminent business shift away from internal manufacturing and a shift towards foundries for AMD continues with a story over at EE Times that refers to a report from financial house FBR.
FBR claims that AMD has placed substantial microprocessor orders with TSMC, the world's largest foundry, which could start 45nm MPU production for AMD in 2Q08.
Though not out of the realms of reality, the rumors are so far coming from the financial community, which poses a problem!
There are few AMD friends in that community and many more aligned with bigger rival Intel. Nothing in this industry should be dismissed out of hand, but I would prefer to get the ‘accurate' info from other sources than purely from the financial community.
I am not sure about 2Q08 for TSMC starting 45nm, unless it is for low-power mobile computing as this is in line with TSMC offering low-power 45nm node technology. Hi-performance non-SOI CMOS technology is due later, so I query the capability of TSMC on both the hi-end performance route with or without the use of SOI wafers.
I also query the ability in that timescale of AMD's ramping MPUs at TSMC due to the process and DFM porting issues, but its just about feasible in the bigger scale of things.
With an investor conference coming up at AMD, I doubt such rumors will go away until then!
The story by Mark LaPedus at EE Times can be viewed here
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/
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