Posted on Tuesday, February 03 2009 @ 21:44 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Theo Valich has an interesting piece about AMD's manufacturing arm, which the company will spin off in a joint venture with Abu Dhabi's ATIC later this month. Theo says The Foundry Co will have two 22nm fabs in 2012; Fab 38 and Fab4x which will be build in Luther Park, NY. Intel is expected to introduce its first 22nm processors in 2011.
On the other hand, Fab4x in Luther Park, NY is being built specifically for 22nm process using 300mm wafers. Fab4x is planned as the native 22nm Fab and first chips will be manufactured using the 22nm process. It is still undecided will that “honor” go to AMD’s CPU/GPU or perhaps customers product, it is still too early to see.
Rise of Fab38 and Fab4x will mean that manufacturing nightmares will finally end for AMD, because this company was always hurting on two levels – when manufacturing was up, AMD didn’t had the architecture to pull it off, and when AMD had the architecture to win the market, the company didn’t had the manufacturing capabilities. With CPU, GPU and chipset being manufactured under the same roof, and yet offering technologies such as SOI, High-K, Low-Power in 45nm, 32nm and 22nm to various customers, seeing 3rd party vendors manufacturing their processors at TFC or should we write “MAD AMD” (Mubadala Abu Dhabi hearts Advanced Micro Devices or simply, Arab Micro Devices) is a definite possibility.
You can read more
over here.
