While totally irrelevant to the topic, I'll just tell you to look harder because you can buy GF's 28nm chips in tablets right now.
I haven't seen that 20nm yet, have you? In fact I havent even seen 28nm yet.
Intel doesn't need to get involved, any one of the ARM guys would do. Qualcomm was long rumoured to be interested, no way could AMD compete with them and there would be no antitrust issues either. AMD would simply have cut their own throats by not guaranteeing capacity for a set number of years until they were better positioned to determine what direction their chipmaking took.
It was almost certainly AMD who asked for 15 years to do so.
While totally irrelevant to the topic, I'll just tell you to look harder because you can buy GF's 28nm chips in tablets right now.
You don't take gambles with your multi-billion dollar business Vesku, and you have to remember that nobody expected PC's to fall away so badly in such a short time-frame - AMD wouldn't even have been considering a total change away from high performance CPU's to low power CPU's back then.
We don't actually know how stalled GF's 28nm is. Rockchip had the RK 3188 in tablets in March - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVSLXSWf4TA so it was almost certainly in volume production in late 2012 at the latest. Just because AMD isn't using it doesn't mean it hasn't been available.
You are the one who brought up 20 nm saying it will be the magic bullet that justifies the GF deal.
You think paying 5.5 billion for ATI wasnt a gamble?
Who else in the market spun off their fabs? How long will Intel be tied to their fabs, paying underutilisation charges? What's the difference?
Nobody else in the industry has spun off their fabs, therefore you can't compare anyone else's circumstances with AMD's.
ATI is the main reason AMD is even around today. But I have come to expect extreme negativity from you regarding anything AMD, unfortunately.The difference between AMD spinning off GloFo versus the other companies above is that AMD was forced to negotiate from a position of extreme financial weakness owing to the disastrously wasteful acquisition of ATI.
How can you NOT be aware of the fact that multiple IDM's have spun of their fabs over the years?
Freescale (fabs spun off from Motorola)
NXP (fabs spun off from Philips)
Infineon (fabs spun off from Seimens)
Qimonda (memory fabs spun off from Infineon, leaving logic fabs at Infineon)
Spansion (spun off from AMD...without being contractually obligated to purchase all future flash from Spansion )
Lucent (fabs spun off from AT&T)
Most of them probably collapsed or something, eg PRoMOS.And those are just the big-name spin-offs, not counting the number of companies that have gone fabless or fab-lite by simply selling their fabs outright to an existing IDM or foundry without becoming enslaved to their foundry for a decade plus.
No the difference was AMD created an entity that it *wanted* and *needed* to be tied to after it's creation. How many of the others can you say that about?The difference between AMD spinning off GloFo versus the other companies above is that AMD was forced to negotiate from a position of extreme financial weakness owing to the disastrously wasteful acquisition of ATI.
Nonsense, AMD would never have been able to go below 32nm on their own. It's doubtful that they'd have been able to complete 32nm on their own. Plenty of bigger guys fell by the wayside at 32nm or simply won't go any further because of the costs involved.Once the ATI deal imploded in terms of value and profits, AMD truly had no choice but to sell the fabs and this meant they had to sell them on the buyers terms under the least favorable (to AMD and AMD's shareholders) circumstances.
Probably the only company in the world that had the desire and money to move AMD's fabs forward (ATIC) was created in 2008 - http://www.atic.ae/vision/road-map/ GF was formed in early 2009. There's your vision and foresight.Had AMD the vision and foresight of knowing they needed to spin-off their fabs then they would not have waited for their merger with ATI to start the process. Instead they gambled big and went for broke, and broke is pretty much what it got them.
ATI is the main reason AMD is even around today. But I have come to expect extreme negativity from you regarding anything AMD, unfortunately.
ATI is the main reason AMD is even around today. But I have come to expect extreme negativity from you regarding anything AMD, unfortunately.
GloFo is the joke of the industry. The only 28nm parts they can make is very low power. Jaguar is not fitted for that.
Sources?
What part of it? That they actually ship any 28nm now?
http://www.techpowerup.com/185836/rockchip-builds-socs-on-globalfoundries-28-nm-hkmg-process.html
28nm-SLP.
SLP is one of three different solutions GF has on 28nm, the other two being LPH and SHP - http://globalfoundries.com/technology/28nm.aspx
Yet we have only seen 1 actual 28nm chip from GloFo.
Two chips, granted both are on SLP. The lack of others doesn't mean that they can only do SLP, it means they didn't have customer orders for anything else before now.
No it was a necessity.
Just to make things clear here:
- you don't think AMD had any other choice except cash out ATI sharehokders using pie-in-the-sky multiples.
- you don't think that AMD had to negotiate the spin off with the bankruptcy clock ticking (hector ruiz own words) made any difference.
Are these assumptions correct?
And that puts them what? 1½-2 years behind TSMC?
3-4 years behind Intel?
Great company that AMD depends on.
Tbh I think we're not discussing the really relevant point here. Why is Jaguar being fabbed at TSMC when GF has been fabbing 28nm since the end of last year? Did AMD just not trust GF to get it ready in time, or what's gone on there?
Wichita and Krishna were borked thanks to GloFo's mismanaged 28nm roadmap. No way AMD was going to make the same mistake with Jaguar.
AMD is desperate, not stupid.