AMD and IBM Working Together on Future Chips

oogbla writes "There is a story over at news.com which says that AMD is teaming up with IBM for its sub-100 nanometer process and is de-emphasizing its previous relationships in that area. Also seems that the Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology they were supposedly getting from Motorola isn't going too well and has caused at least one delay to Barton."

Comments

AMD vs Intel

[Elbereth]

It's interesting how all the hardware sites lambasted Intel for the design of the Pentium 4, because it didn't have the raw speed of the AMD Athlon or Pentium 3. What made this all rather amusing to me, however, was that these people weren't around to see the evolution of the 386 vs 486, 486 vs Pentium, and, to a lesser extent, the 286 vs 386. In each of these situations, the previous generation of chip was able to eek a few more cycles over the next generation... in the beginning of the next generation's run! Intel has a very strong history of designing chips that ramp up very well (except for their one CPU engineering failure, the Pentium Pro, which was too ambitiously designed).

I wasn't surprised when the AMD Athlon pulled out ahead of the Pentium 4, then fell very far behind. The Athlon was not engineered to ramp up well over 1 GHz. AMD was very foolish to race to that point, seeing as how long it took them to get working silicon at just 2 GHz.

I'm not saying that I bought a Pentium 4, just that I knew it would eventually overtake the Athlon. I'm quite happy with a cheap Athlon, myself. Semiconductors is a soap opera for nerds. That's why I read The Register, not EE Times.

My guess is that there's going to be a lot more consolodation in the semiconductor and memory world. I bet Micron, AMD, Motorola, and Apple are all going to end up merging, buying out, and/or disappearing in the next few months. Maybe HP will buy them all.

Re:AMD vs Intel

[sean23007]

I hope you misspoke when you said Apple would merge or disappear. Apple isn't going anywhere, as can be seen by their repeated strong showings at their release party conferences and on Wall Street. Apple is a strong company that is in no danger of being purchased. The only thing I can foresee that resembles what you are talking about is if Apple were to buy out Motorola or Micron and so be able to manufacture their own processors and/or memory units. But the next revision of the PowerPC processor went to IBM, not Motorola, and IBM and Apple will not consolidate into one company. Perhaps if Apple bought Motorola (almost impossible), they would start making computers with and integrated G4 that perhaps isn't upgradeable, but runs cooler in less space than a socket processor. A good step for their iMacs and Powerbooks, if they don't do it already. They can't really do the same for memory, as people will always want to upgrade their RAM. They just can't do away with DIMM slots.

In short, your vision of consolidation might not be wrong, but I think you have chosen the wrong companies. AMD and Apple have business alliances with IBM, a very strong company with little to no interest in consolidation with either company. Motorola is into too many things to be bought, but isn't doing well enough to buy anyone. Of all the options, they are the most likely to go under, but I wouldn't count on it. And Micron can continue to sell RAM as long as people continue making software that needs it. They probably aren't in that great a danger, especially in the next few months

Re:This should happen (more commentary)...

[$$$$$exyGal]

IBM, of course, will also benefit. The company rivals Intel in semiconductor research, but its chip sales are only one-eighth as large. Licensing its technology, and manufacturing chips for other companies, opens revenue streams for Big Blue.

Licensing technology out to others is exactly what IBM should be doing in this case. It helps the industry and that will, in turn, help them. This is great for IBM in the short term and the long term.

--naked

Re:IBM slow... AMD... hot

[binaryDigit]

IBM is simply offering production services to AMD, this is not another AIM alliance or anything like that. So IBM mgmt slowness should not be an issue at all. AMD simply is another IBM Semi customer.

As for IBM mgmt, well yes, in many ways IBM is the poster child for the slow and ponderous company. However, when they decide to do something (and do it right, well as much as can be expected) they can be the unstoppable force. RS/6000 and ThinkPad are two excellent examples.

Not so sure it was a bad business move...

[Kjella]

I wasn't surprised when the AMD Athlon pulled out ahead of the Pentium 4, then fell very far behind. The Athlon was not engineered to ramp up well over 1 GHz. AMD was very foolish to race to that point, seeing as how long it took them to get working silicon at just 2 GHz.

It gave AMD some very good credibility, having the fastest processors, not just being some copycat always behind. Without that credibility, they would never have gotten Athlon MP in on the market. Most likely they wouldn't get money for the investments they'd need (and still do) to keep up with Intel otherwise.

It showed that Intel could be beaten, at least for a short while. Kinda like the gfx cards. Geforce, Geforce DDR, Geforce 2, Geforce 2 GTS, Geforce 3, Geforce 3 Ultra, Geforce 4... Radeon 9700! Ok Nvidia might strike back just as hard with Geforce FX, but it's the same thing.

Besides, it's not like AMD is really far behind. I've seen AMD2800+ in the stores, Intel has 3.06GHz (assuming those PR ratings are still close to valid). Of course AMD is now playing pretty much every design trick in the book (FSB, additional layer, minor core improvements+++) to keep up, so they need SOI and/or Hammer fairly soon, but they're still in loop.

Kjella