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.

Im not being fanboyish but I do find Intel is adding the final insult by announcing some new chips as news above the AMD Split, the timing was right at AMD's lowest ebb....... Highly amusing... I am really starting to feel for AMD now as I am installing proberly one of my last AMD chips a x2 5000 bought for £34........


It reminds me of a sketch where a woman is tied to a tree in a state distress and has been "attacked" by a group of men and found by a single male..

She is greatful to be "rescued", but is taunted with - I guess this aint your lucky day....

AMD is that lady tied to the tree

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.

Real men have fabs.

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.

I think the more interesting thing here that no one has commented on is the fact that Hector is still with AMD and in a very powerful position, and in fact a more powerful position than Dirk.

If Hector wishes to try this strategy he has a lot of power to push it through.

Now I think it has its up sides and down sides. The up side is of course lower cost for AMD thus resulting in better profits per chip and possibly lower cost for the end user (us). The downside is quality control will not be in AMDs hands and could cause potential backlash for the end users (us again).

As I said its still just a rumor but its been one of the longest running and I am interested to see if it does happen and if it truly does go through what the side affects will be.

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.

Actually, AMD/ATI already outsources fabbing of the Radeon HD family of GPU's to TSMC, they have for quite a while. In fact I think they also outsource Chipset manufacturing to TSMC as well. Which is why the 4850/4870 and most of the current AMD chipsets use TSMC's 55nm node. Otherwise, AMD only really has one operational fab, and thats fab36. Fab30/38 is still in the refitting process.

The main reason for the split would be to get AMD's operational costs down. But Dirks said it's not really necessary for them to drop the fabs to do that.

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 didn't even notice that.

I wounder what metal IBM plans to use if not Hafnium. I like that word. Hafnium. It sounds funny.

I thought only good companies slit?

Not as good as Unobtainium

Further demonstrates how little he knows in fabrication technology.

Nice. I like that one too. Metals have funny names.