Apple has bought a fab

[Systems analyst]

ARM are working with Global Foundries on 10 and 7 nm physical IP. 'Nuff said.

 

[Ajay]

Agreed. Maxim Integrated is an analog/mixed-signal company; it's completely the wrong kind of facility for digital logic production. Plus it's far too small, even for a test fab.

Yeah, it seems to me that Apple has something up their sleeves. Perhaps a cheap way for Apple to experiment with new sensors or something like that. They need new tricks to keep moving the sales needle on iPhones.

 

[Arachnotronic]

ARM are working with Global Foundries on 10 and 7 nm physical IP. 'Nuff said.

Do you just parrot this line in every thread? Lol.

 

[Concillian]

$18.2 million for a place on First St. in San Jose? This does not sound like it's very large or has much equipment associated with it to be any kind of serious wafer fab. Sounds like a spot for doing some specialized R&D maybe.

If this includes equipment its some kind of side project for a team of ~20-40 people. Without equipment, sure maybe it's something a little bigger, but $18m in silicon valley doesn't buy a big facility. There's no way it is going to have the space for any kind of serious semi fab

 

[ShintaiDK]

ARM are working with Global Foundries on 10 and 7 nm physical IP. 'Nuff said.

If that's the success criteria it must be a massive failure.

 

[jpiniero]

$18.2 million for a place on First St. in San Jose? This does not sound like it's very large or has much equipment associated with it to be any kind of serious wafer fab. Sounds like a spot for doing some specialized R&D maybe.

Like I mentioned, it's for R&D. And for the car.

 

[Systems analyst]

Do you just parrot this line in every thread? Lol.

Does that make it untrue?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Does that make it untrue?

It's totally irrelevant.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Good. We've been trying to dump that fab for awhile now

Plenty of companies run small fabs at older nodes for their own specialty purposes, but none of them could be used for mass market manufacturing. I agree with the article's conclusion, I would guess Apple wants to research doing some in-house mixed-signal stuff.

I'm still doing designs at 180nm on a daily basis (either our own or TSMC), with a decent dose of 90nm, most of the time with a low number of available metal layers for routing. Have you seen modern EDA tools trying to route on just 2-3 layers? It ain't pretty
Hell, occasionally I get an ECO request for an OLD process (eg. 450nm)

 

[ehume]

Why is GloFlo still in business? Do they have an income to pay their people with?

 

[TechGod123]

What's there to understand? Glofo is as irrelevant as AMD is. Even their owner is trying unload them.

How the hell is AMD irrelevant?

 

[videogames101]

How the hell is AMD irrelevant?

As a company? Because they're hemorrhaging cash of course.

Thats not to say they have no good products, but even thats irrelevant if you don't make any money.

 

[Phynaz]

How the hell is AMD irrelevant?

How are they relevant? They currently hold about 2% of the x86 CPU market.

From nearly three years ago;
http://arstechnica.com/business/201...e-top-of-the-mountain-to-the-deepest-valleys/

Or, just Google "AMD irrelevant" and look at all the news reports.

 

[prtskg]

How are they relevant? They currently hold about 2% of the x86 CPU market.

From nearly three years ago;
http://arstechnica.com/business/201...e-top-of-the-mountain-to-the-deepest-valleys/

Or, just Google "AMD irrelevant" and look at all the news reports.

Did you miss a zero after 2?
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

 

[ShintaiDK]

Did you miss a zero after 2?
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Your graph is useless, since its just passmark submits.

However we know AMDs revenue on x86 is 2% and Intel 98%.

 

[Phynaz]

Did you miss a zero after 2?
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Installed base <> market share.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Your graph is useless, since its just passmark submits.

However we know AMDs revenue on x86 is 2% and Intel 98%.

AMD is expected to generate ~$3.98 billion in total revenue this year, with about half coming from semi-custom and the other half coming from the "legacy" businesses (i.e. PC GPUs, dGPUs).

If we assume x86 PC MPU revenue of about $1.5 billion and if we compare it to the roughly ~$32 billion that Intel takes in with its Client Computing Group (substantially all PC platform related revenue), then this would put AMD's revenue share at ~4.4%.

That is the definition of irrelevant.

 

[prtskg]

Holding 2% market and holding 4.4% revenue from entire X86 business is entirely different thing. 2% market means in 100 X86 chips, 2 are from AMD.