GF Yields Doubled for AMD

AMD and GlobalFoundries made a major announcement today. AMD's Roy Read commended GF for "doubling of yields on 32nm". AMD will also use GF's 28nm HKMG processes, which "are qualified and ready for design-in today."

GF's FAB1 (former Dresden FAB of AMD) can now output 80,000 wafers per month.

That kind of capacity ought to be enough quench the APU thirst of Apple, HP, Lenovo, HP, Acer and others.

Intel's Sour Grapes Untruth Exposed

In the past few days, we heard Intel execs saying that SeaMicro begged for Intel's acquisition, and Intel was unimpressed. The press, always ignorant, was thrown into confusion and doubt.

Now, SeaMicro's Fred Weber, former CTO of AMD, politely pointed out the truth without directly accusing Intel of lying.

According to a SeaMicro spokesperson, Intel "incorporated features into its roadmap at SeaMicro's request ... organized and facilitated numerous meetings with [SeaMicro] senior executives and participation in its own events, including a joint press conference just over a month ago ... "

But, "at no time did a SeaMicro executive, employee, agent, banker, approach Intel about selling SeaMicro to [Intel]."

It is ironic that AMD is gonna frag Intel with stacks of tightly packed Atoms.

No wonder Roy Read is laughing out loud.

But, if Fred Weber is telling the truth, the way to prove it is to sue Intel for defamation.

The World's First 4GHz x64 CPU Now Available

4.2GHz

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819106009&Tpk=fx-4170

AMD's Apple Plan

Intel makes and sells a lot of CPUs, it owns 80% of the PC CPU market, but its market cap is only 25% of Apple.

With the SeaMicro acquisition, AMD will start selling cloud computing servers equipped with Intel's Atom chips.

The reason is simple. AMD's new CEO realizes that it is in the business of making money. And the Apple story says selling finished highend products brings in more profits.

The AMD SeaMicro technology shows that you actually don't need powerful and complex chips like the 16 core Opterons or Xeons, a bunch of Atoms can achieve similar effects. In ApacheBench for web performance, a single 10U AMD SeaMicro server with 512 Atoms can outperform 45 dual socket quad core servers, but uses 25% of the power and space consumed by the latter.

Intel would have no objections to that statement.

So that's how AMD is shifting its focus from the struggle with Intel to corporate profitability.

If Intel wants to grow like Apple, it will need to rethink its own goals too. A monopolistic mindset bent on deriving profits by eliminating competition does not seem to work well in the internet era.