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AMD Receives $683M for Dresden Plant
Cocooner writes "Infoworld has an article explaining how AMD received $683 million in grants from Germany and the state of Saxony for its next-generation microprocessor wafer facility. The new plant will be located in Dresden, adjacent to Fab 30 and will be called Fab 36. It will be the first AMD 300mm manufacturing facility."
Woohoo!
After hearing how much the improvements in Linux performance was, I decided to do some benchmarks.
Here are the Machines I used.
AMD Opeteron 3400+ with UltraSCSI320 Hard disks
XServe G5
386SX with MFM hard disks
Copying a 17 Mebibyte file from one hard drive to another.
SCO UnixWare : 7.3 Seconds
Windows Longhorn Server beta : 7.5 Seconds.
Windows Server 2003 : 9 Seconds
Mac OS X Server 2004 : 9.5 Seconds
Windows 2000 Server : 11 Seconds
Linux 2.7 Server : 16 Seconds.
Linux 2.6 Server : 18 Seconds
MSDOS on a 386DX : 20 Seconds.
Linux 2.4 Server : 30 Seconds
Linux 2.2 Server : 48 Seconds
Linux 2.0 Server : 75 Seconds.
As you can See, Linux dosent come CLOSE to beating enterprise systems at high performance servers. EVEN Msdos from a 386SX smokes Linux!
Don't mod me down unless you can justify these speeds. It is pretty obvious by now why SCO is suing Linux, because they are stealing their code to gain speed. And yes, DMA WAS ENABLED.
Dear Professor Linux,
How can I keep from soiling my pink underpanties in a fit of apoplexy every time I hear wee French referred to as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"?
Sincerely,
Francois P.
"The new Dresden facility ... will employ 1,000 local workers when it is completed"
Why would the government give a $683M break to AMD to get 1000 jobs? That's two thirds of a million bucks per job. It's amazing that a $2B facility can be staffed by only 1000 people.
-B
It will benefit AMD, Germany, and us as consumers. They will product better quality products at lower price points. There's not much to lose here, really.
I think it will also benefit the Linux community because AMD tradiationally delivers a better price/performance ratio than Intel. AMD getting better can only mean that Linux's power increases, both server-side and on the desktop.
Kudos to AMD!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Where WTO when you need it?
Holy smokes, are they planning on stuffing the whole motherboard into the CPU? I know, I know, it's a typo... :)
nice to see fair trade and buisness in action, who needs the lottery when you can just become an AMD executive and with all this free money about you are a millionaire overnight
Whats the nm-age supposed to be? 90? 130? Even thinner?
The Germans can afford it because they're saving all that money by using Jewish concentration camp prisoners to do all the work.
Oh, wait, no. That was during WWII. My mistake.
Just in time for the next B-17 raid
One MS ad telling you Linux TCO is higher than Windows and one from ZoneAlarm reminding you of all the security vulnerabilities you're going to have to guard against.
First you bomb the city to pieces in WW II, and now you expect them to pay you for the factory? Wouldn't it be fair if American Micro Devices paid Dresden for all the war damages?
Flaming death is what the West does best.
Wow! Dresdem is a nice city. I think its a good place for AMD. However I would preferto pays for FOSS development. 1000 Jobs? No problem.
It truly will help Linux.
I assume the chips produced at the new plant would generate tax revenue too.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
AMD, based in Sunnyvale, California, has no plans to convert its existing Dresden fab to 300 millimeters because it wouldn't be a cost-effective way to introduce that technology, Prairie said.
Probably also because it would for a longer time block the main production facility for Athlon and Optoron chips.
If you have many fabs doing the same kind of chip process like Intel it is much easier to temporary stop one of them.
Thank you, Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and the men of the Eighth Air Force.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
first they send our coding jobs to India..
now they send our CPU fabrication jobs to Germany.
whats next?
would like to help.
it wont exactly make up for pointlessly killing 300,000 o dresden's inhabitants 60 years ago, but its a start
Just look at how many people work at the International Space Station.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
How much new revenues will this new plant bring into Dresden? 600 million plus seems an awful lot of money to get just 1000 additional jobs.
Unless the city going to get substantial revenues from taxes, or increased business opportunities for vendors, it seems like a huge waste of money.
more about me
The State gives the people's money away to YOU!
(Seriously, why not just take the cash and give it to the people who would have been employed there, and cut out the AMD middleman?)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
By using the larger wafers, AMD can cut more chips from each wafer and reduce the manufacturing cost per chip...
:-P
Intel Corp. already has two 300-millimeter plants in Oregon and one in New Mexico. One 300 millimeter plant is under construction in Ireland, and another existing facility in Arizona is being converted to the larger wafers.
AMD chips are already cheaper than intel, even though intel already has plants to make these types of wafers. now that these new plants will save them even more money in manufacturing costs, does that mean the market prices will get even lower vs intel??
--krewe, ready for my new AMD CPU
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
This is goverment intervention of the free markets.
This is a threat to Globalism!
The period between 1950 and 1973 was by far the most successful of the century. This was an era characterised by capital controls, fixed exchange rates, strong trade unions, a large public sector and a general acceptance of government's role in demand management. The average annual growth in "per capita real GDP" throughout the world was 2.9% - precisely twice as high as the average rate in the two decades since then.
parent is a piece of shit, fishing for empty karma so he can then troll, troll, troll. Check his history, and try (TRY) to find a Slaughter college (or a slauhgter, for that matter).
The German's started bombing London a full five years before Dresden was bombed, It is a horrible tragedy that civilians were attacked, (on either side) but let us not forget who were the aggressors. The German's attack on London made it morally (in the relative morality of war) acceptable wipe out an entire city, the German will had to be crushed in order to end the bloodshed STARTED by the Germans.
I can't believe that Adolf Hitler just took a shit on a jew in a concentration camp! What the fuck? Our Fuhrer should show some modesty, even if jews are nothing but shit toilets. Anybody thinking anything different will be personally sent to a camp by Adolf Hitler himself. 30 SS soldiers will come to toss you in the jew oven. There is no way you can play it off as stupidity.
It doesn't help at all that Jews steal everything from hard working Aryans. They can hardly walk for all they steal from us! How are you going to explain your jew-loving to your family when they are in the poorhouse because some jew stole their money and life? Our Fuhrer will make you drop trou before you get put in the oven just for good measure.
There it is. The SS is knocking on your door now. You have to go.
"...AMD received $683 million in grants from Germany and the state of Saxony for its next-generation microprocessor wafer facility."
:)
it's not like AMD is gonna change the money into
euro coins and stack them to make a nice looking
factory made from coins, no sir.
the question really is:
who owned the land before AMD bought it (tax?).
who is building the factory(tax?).
who is supplying power(tax?).
who is building the generators that produce
the needed electricity(tax?).
who gets to have a peek at the technology (know-how) once complet(no tax!)
who gets know-how for building a chip
producing factory? (def. more to come!)
etc.
this is a micro investment and the reward is def.
going to pay off as long as people have to use
computers (e.g. no telepathy available).
The German VP of AMD was assaulted by President Schroeder who, according tohis own explanation, was "trying to kiss his boots".
haha you misspelled "score"
...fucking pathetic that they wouldn't want to or couldn't build in the US (cost)....
America is fucking pathetic.
How there are never stories titled:
"Huge new manufacturing facility to be constructed in $US_STATE?"
or
"$BLOATED_CORPORATION to hire 12,000 new workers?"
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
efficiency is of prime importance. Thus the use of
C would be limited and well controlled, rather like small assembler routines are currently used in some systems for the same purpose. Indeed the move to C++ should only be considered in the case of upgrading a body of C programs for backwards compatibility. In the case of new projects alternatives to C and C++ should seriously be considered.
advanced musician ensure that the tempo of a
piece is correct, and since playing to a metronome
is more difficult, will help sharpen the musicians
performance of the piece. The musician does not
just view the metronome as an aid for beginners,
or as something that restricts him to a set beat, but
as a tool that helps produce a polished and
professional performance. C should not be seen as
a language to which you graduate after you have
learnt to program in languages with safety checks.
In fact changing to C or C++ is a great step
backwards. Languages with consistency and
semantic checks are essential aids to the
production of professional software.
Programming is the orchestration of change
within a large state space. Object-oriented
techniques provide a method of simple division
and management of such state spaces. Managing
such state spaces requires the simplest techniques,
in order to guard against detectable
inconsistencies that lead to errors in executable
systems. C and C++ do not implement the simple
management of a large state space, and allow
many potential errors to go undetected. The role
of a language as a tool cannot seriously be
regarded as some authoritarian that stops us doing
what we want or need to do, as many languages
with type safety and consistency checks are often
viewed. Programming languages should embody
the collective wisdom of common sense practices
that have been learnt over many years, by
common and painful experience. C++ lacks the
implementation of much of this wisdom.
[Sakkinen 92] observes that much of the C++
literature has few references to external work or
research. It fails to draw on the insights and
progress made by many researchers. This leads
me to believe that C++ is parochial and removed
from the many advances that will make
production of systems easier and more cost
effective.
This paper has shown many cases where C++
uses old C mechanisms to provide things that can
and should be expressed consistently within the
object-oriented paradigm. For example type
casting. The move to pure object-oriented
languages will facilitate more consistent
programming and avoid many typical errors that
occur in software production. C++ also makes
distinctions that belong in the ?how?
implementation domain. For example, ?.? vs ?->,
and variables and functions. These make
bookkeeping work for programmers, which
should be handled by a compiler. But then C++
fails to make distinctions that belong in the ?what?
problem domain. For example, procedures vs
functions. Making distinctions in the ?how?
domain adds inconvenience to the language.
Failing to make distinctions in the ?what? domain
limits the power and expressiveness of the
language. The amount of change required in C++
to address the issues raised in this paper is seen as
largely insurmountable.
It is better to detect and avoid errors than to
fix them. The fixing of errors happens many times
during the development process. This slows down
the development process, and is therefore costly.
Good programmers in this context (often called
?gurus?), are those who recognise symptoms, and
recommend fixes. Good programmers in the better
sense (often called ?impractical idealistic
dreamers?) adopt better practices (programming
languages being a subset of these), that avoid
error in the first place.
A programming language is just a tool, in the
same way that an axe is a tool. If the axe is blunt
when chopping down a tree, then procedu
What more needs to be said.
AMD is planning in 2008 to build a 500MM fab for its upcomming 65 nm chips near alveston, in the United Kingdom. Alveston is a small town north of the City of Bristol. The plans are spotty at the moment, buit it is supposedly bieng built for The Opteron X chip, that features a 5Ghz FSB!
So will 36 trendy gay men decorate the factory and have the workers wear something stylish?
The parent just pulled "facts" out of his ass.
Opteron X -> isnt planed
5Ghz Fsb -> Opteron has no fsb
500mm -> even intel says that the next 5 years they wont TRY creating bigger than 300mm wafers,
65nm -> 2008 65nm will be old stuff...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It is nice to see AMD expanding its company. I have been using AMD chips for several years now, and couldn't be happier. When a company spends the time and money to make developments in arcitecture, they should get something nice in return. Unfortunatly I don't feel intel has been making the advances. The Intel name has been carrying them for a while now, and its time AMD got their recognition.
I've been using the Athlon64 chips and couldn't be happier. Hopefully the new plant will help them nibble away another part of Intel's market share.
www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040201/prescott-05.html
All Rights Reserved. All Wrongs Avenged.
I live in the North of England, and at least the AMD plant is still around and AMD is a German company, unlike the white elephant of Siemens.
.... that extreme Thatcherite way of thinking has been thoroughly descredited and thrown in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
No serious politicial party would subscribe to such reidiculous statement.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
>>It will benefit AMD, Germany, and us as consumers.
Yes, let me be the first American to say "Thanks, all you hard-working Germans for paying high taxes to subsidize the cost of my computer chips. Rock on!"
Hey, all my college professors were right -- Socialism DOES work. (Just not for the people who must pay for it.)
I'm generally not attracted to men, but my God something about Hitler just drives me absolutely batty! That dramatic sweep of hair across his brow, like he just tossed his head and there it fell, a cascade of black like the velvet curtain of night. I want him to take me on the hood of a King Tiger, its 1400 horsepower engine revving as he violates the virginal secrets of my Eagle's Nest.
I picture it like those glorious mass rallies the Nazis used to have. There he is lovingly pounding away at my second front while legions of goose-stepping Aryans march past and salute our union. Just as Hitler is about to empty his tiny ubermenschen into the expanse of my Liebe-raum a wing of Stukas will fly overhead, their sirens howling in synchronicity with the primal cries of pleasure from Der Fuehrer.
My god, what a man!
when a US company builds a US factory.
In the same way it would not be remarkable when a German company built a German factory, nor when an Indian company built an Indian factory.
It is a bit more remarkable when the US business drones without brains build another facility outside the US, then complain that US consumers arent buying it's products. Everyone is worried about the "jobless recovery", but they fail to point the fingers at themselves for shipping the jobs ( and salaries ) overseas. Mind you, I am not nessesarily of the "protectionist" mindset, but it does seem that some moderation is called for.
emt 377 emt 4
and be surprised: it will be gone as if you never wrote it. Slashcode's anti-deception measures surely work.
Yeah they're gonna start making chips using vacuum tubes (valves, for you Brits). 300mm between active devices is about right for high-power tube technology.
So it goes... -KV Anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about SHOULD.
..it has no strageic value, so you know it will never be bombed if there is a war.
The US is spending over billions a week in Iraq! At least the German is getting a high tech chip production plant and 1000 high tech jobs.
I guess we will get lower (HA!) price down the road from Iraq?
What about the U.S. spending billions on weaponry, why is nobody whining about that? Socialism in disguise if you ask me.
even happier it was not near me..Horrible places that produce huge amounts of heinous sand some really AWFUL smells.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
does it filter our "score" only when used in conjunction with other words or will it filter out any occurrence? either way, slashdot continues to get lamer and lamer.
Why would the government give a $683M break to AMD to get 1000 jobs?
The EU recently decided that it was illegal for local governments to subsidise private companies to do business in their region. Could be that AMD haven't quite thought this through...
Seriously, why not just take the cash and line your own pockets and cut out the dead people in the middle ?
http://www.ezresult.com/article/Bombing_of_Dresden _in_World_War_II
There were targets of military value there. In addition to those things listed in the above wikipedia article, there must have been food production, clothing, and other items of that sort. The unfortunate thing about modern warefare is that these things are effectively military targets as they support the military ability of the country that makes them. The people, unfortunately, can work in the military or supporting factories, and are therefore part of the equation. The argument you put forth about this being so late in the war is an argument made in hindsight. At the time, the Germans were still fighting hard, and while it looked like the allies would prevail, the issue was still in doubt. You do not let up until the enemy has surrendered. Anything less will cause the war to drag on longer, and this is bad for both sides.
The German bombing of London was intended to instill terror in the British people. As with the German, the English, so it can be argued as above that this has military utility, I am just trying to make it clear that the bombing of London was no different, except that Germany did not have the means to firebomb a city, the allies did. Rest assured that the Germans would have firebombed English cities, had they the means. Go read some history, lookup Guernica, Warsaw, London, and Coventry.
Also, equivilency of casualties is not of any value. In military operations, you never strive to inflict equal damage to that which you have sustained, you attempt to knock the fight out of the enemy.
You also curiously dont mention the V1 and V2 weapons in your analysis. These weapons where terribly inaccurate, only suitable as terror weapons. And the V1's were flying against England from Feb of 1944, a year before Dresden was firebombed.
After sustaining the nerve-racking attacks from earlier in the war, I, for one, am prepared to forgive a desire to have some vengance on the Germans on the part of the English. I do think they should have forsworn it, but I can understand it.
Also, understand that the Germans to the largest extent, had opened that can of worms.
All the above said, I want it understood that I am not anti-German by any means. I do not apportion complete blame for the beginnings of World War One or Two to the Germans ( I bring in WWI, as I see it as having lead to WWII ), rather, I think it is shared amoung a great many players, the Germans included, but to no greater or lesser degree than any other.
emt 377 emt 4
"It is the job of the government, after all, to improve the lot of its people."
Actually, no. In a -free- republic the job of government is to manage the rule of law, provide for the common defence of the nation, and enforce contracts. Other than that they are supposed to stay out of the road and let people get on with their lives.
Anything else is just the forced redistributuion of wealth,otherwise known as stealing. Which is why East Germany is such a basket case in the first place. People are not inspired to work hard when they know the government is just going to take their money.
Is Billy Pilgrim involved in the deal?
Considering that is almost half the cost of such a plant, it is really going to help AMD's chip costs. Perhaps we will see affordable FX class CPU's.
I lived in Dresden last year, and things haven't been too wonderful there since reunification. Lots of people have been leaving the city to head west, where there are better jobs. The city of Dresden actually pays people 300,- just to move there from other parts of the country (I think some other cities in the eastern part of the country do this as well). That money will easily cover the first month of rent in most areas of the city -- everybody I met would pay about 150,- per month.
That said, this will certainly help bring a little more 'balance' to the country (the Dresden VW plant also helps). 1000 high-paying jobs means potentially 1000 families...lots of little kids that need schoolteachers, food, clothes. I'm sure that the AMD plant will bring in way more money than this in taxes after a few years anyway...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
where it was one of the worst economic periods in history (on the tail end at least). One of the only times in US history where you had stagflation - inflation coupled with high unemployment and sagging GDP.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Is that like Fab 4x9? How would you like 9 sets of Beatles walking around?
- Moomin
Why dont we hear the same kind of comments when articles about India and China are posted? Especially articles where their governments are funding projects?
people here are white, american and racist.
Don't you think that if having the government handing out money made everyone richer, we would have noticed by now? I mean, it is what governments do best. There is plenty of experience in the field.
Every Euro the government pumps into the Dresden economy is one that it has taken out of some other part of Germany. Any multiplying effects it may have when paid out will be matched by the opposite effect where it was taken from.
And thanks for the articles, but if you read the first one it clearly points out that this is a Keynesian concept, while other schools of economic thought disagree. And I don't think I've heard anyone bring up Keynes in earnest since the 80s. Thyere is too much real world experience...
In the context of German politics I suspect this is more of a "Marshall plan" to bring the former DDR parts of the country up to the level of the rest of the country than any attempt at general economic stimulus.
"The new plant will be located in Dresden, adjacent to Fab 30 and will be called Fab 36. It will be the first AMD 300mm manufacturing facility."
I don't believe it for a second folks. I've seen enough episodes of Hogan's Heroes to know that it's really a secret munitions dump.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
As it happens, the bombing of London began during the Battle of Britain. Hitler wanted some payback for a single small raid that the Brits managed to squeeze into Berlin, so he shifted the Luftwaffe raids away from the airfields of southern England (military targets) to the terror bombing of London (civillian target).
This was stupid for two reasons. First and most important was that it took the pressure off the RAF airfields and lead to them winning the Battle of Britain.
That alone arguably cost Hitler the war, as it was the use of Britain as a base that allowed the destruction of German manufacturing by the combined airforces of the US, Britain and Canada. Including Dresden. (And yes, Canada had a big ass airforce in WWII. Half the Spitfires ever built were made in Canada.)
Second, the prolonged Blitz raids set the moral stage for all bombings of cities later in the war. Dresden was just a "better" version of the London raids.
As were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for that matter. The US actually did more damage to Tokyo with regular bombing than they did with the nukes, but the shock value of that mushroom cloud was what finally broke the Japanese High Command. Two weeks of bomb damage done with one aircraft and one bomb in ten seconds is hard to ignore. Doing it twice in a row...
These days we have it much better, you don't HAVE to blow up a whole city to get at one little factory. You can fly a smart bomb down the chimney instead, which is why Bhagdad still has a downtown. I'm sure Churchill would have preferred doing it that way, but he didn't have F-111s and satellite photography. Bummer for Dresden.
Besides, wars are not about how many people get killed, they are about making the other guy quit fighting. The Dresden bombing got the job done.
After all, would you rather be saluting Hitler's friggin' moron of a grandson?
all of those times are horribly... i just copied 45mb from my main PC over to my server across a 100mbit network connection (wich is a hell of alot slower than any HDD), and it took about 4 seconds. im guessing you dont have proper drivers for your SCSI device there.
As soon as I saw the first thing I thought of was Hyundai/Hynix and some of the other Enterprise Zone projects started in Oregon in the mid-late 1990's.
The Enterprise Zones were areas designated for industrial development that would receive special tax breaks for the first five years or so. It looked really good on paper, and politicians could say they were doing something about the high unemployment, which looked really good to them.
The two biggest projects were a CD-pressing plant owned by Sony in Springfield, OR and a DRAM plant owned by Hyundai in Eugene. Both were touted as creating lots of high paying jobs. Both actually were fairly good corporate citizens while times were good. A politically significant (~1000 total) jobs were created in the $9-10/hour range, though most of the engineering and management positions were filled by people brought in from out-of-state and out-of-country. A third company moved into supply packaging materials to Sony. Everyone was happy.
Then the economy went south. Hyundai canceled a planned expansion of its plant, went bankrupt, closed the plant for over a year while they upgraded the equipment after negoiating a multi-year extension to their tax-break package, then finally re-opened employing fewer people then before. When Sony couldn't get their tax-package enlarged and extended, they just up and left, as did the packaging company.
The final blow was when Komag, maker of hard-drive platters (and recipient of the smallest-subsidies) went bankrupt, sold-out its equipment and walked away from a once billion dollar facility that was one of the last plants making platters in the US (at least I think that is what the newspaper said).
The Enterprise Zone program is still on the books, but with a change in focus. Instead on trying to lure big companies to build big, they are rewarding smaller, more local companies who expand their operations. While companies like Sony received almost as much in tax breaks as they paid out in wages, the smaller firms generally receive tax breaks equal to 1-2 years wages for the additional jobs they create. The additional profits remain in the local economy and these local companies are less likely to up and walk away when the mood suits them. It doesn't make as good a press release, but is much more effective.
All in all, I hope Germany has better luck with AMD than Oregon did with its multi-nationals, but they should look at better ways to spend future tax-grant money.
They were NAZIS!
Largely civillian Nazis but Nazis all the same.
Considering all the trouble they caused we treated Nazis pretty well.If you don't want to get bombed by the USA(or our funny talking dentally challenged little brothers in the UK) do a little better job picking your government.Or at least pick one that will surrender when the jig is up-unlike Imperial Japan which required a double-nuke spanking.
You must be new here.
Oh wait, I see by your UID (749283) that you are. Consider yourself trolled.
You are a retard. HTH, HAND.
The new plant will be located in Dresden, adjacent to Fab 30 and will be called Fab 36
Where is Fab 30 in relation to Slaughterhouse 5?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Too bad they didn't do anything to lure the new Intel fab to Eugene. Oh well. I'm getting the hell out of this town as soon as possible and moving to Boise where they have growth, jobs, and a lack of dirty hippies.
Oh, and they don't have the UO Ducks in Boise, which is just fine by me. I am so sick of college sports and the SUV-driving O-flag waving scourge-of-the-road drivers who attend them.
The die size for an FX-51 or Athlon64 is stupid-big, because of larger registers/extra registers, the on-board memory controller, and the extra circuitry to accomadate 64 bits. So each individual AMD processor is larger than its Intel cousin. Check out a wafer comparison here. As I understand it, AMD is doing this becasue it has to. Without 300mm wagers and 90nm or 65nm technology, their chips will cost too much and be produced in too little quantity for AMD to survive. It's not about whether or not AMD chips will become cheaper, its about whether or not AMD will still exist a couple of years from now.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Good for Germans. They just made sure that AMD wouldn't relocate their factory to China or India. Speaking of a country that really cares for their citizens. Good job!
> It will be the first AMD 300mm manufacturing facility.
It will be the first AMD 1 foot manufacturing facility.
If AMD can lower it's costs, they are in a much better position. Currently, even though they have superior products to Intel, they are still just barely holding on.
Intel can always clobber them with co-operative marketing rebates and money talks. Think about Intel's marketing budget. They spent $300 million telling people that they should want Centrino. Then when people go to stores they pick a Centrino, thinking they are getting really good wireless and get stuck with 802.11b when they could have better 802.11g wireless with an AMD notebook!! That's reality distortion you get from advertising. Too bad perception trumps reality.
Just tell me how many Intel and Dell adds you see. I'm always so impressed that AMD does what it does with the resources it has available. Wow! Just imagine what they could do if they had the resources, a sustainable profit could provide. Then we'd see more innovation.
Clearly, my understanding of what constitutes flamebait is much different from whoever happened to moderate this one! For my benefit, and the benefit of /.'s future posters everywhere, somebody please explain to me why my comments were considered "flamebait -1". I thought, if anything, it'd be regarded as insightful.
It's a simple fact that Germans are, by way of their taxes, subsidizing the cost of these chips -- Germany's government is giving huge amounts of money to AMD to establish their plant and that portion of the construction costs won't be charged to the non-German consumer.
What about that is flamebait? Or is anything even slightly anti-AMD (or anti-communism, for that matter) considered to be one of those "holy" topics that one is not allowed to discuss here?
Unless someone can explain this one, I'm going to have to assume the latter which simply makes the moderators intellectual cowards.
While some may think it's a lot of money down the drain, I see it as a welcome stimulation of the tech industry. How can such a boon be seen as a waste? Do you want faster processors or not? ;)
AMD wouldn't be alive if they weren't wrapping German taxpayers' Euros around every part.
Amen to that
I live in a socialist country in north europe, Sweden. Our goverment must be the best at stealing from its people, refined into perfection in many years. For example in my state the minimum income tax is 33% of your salary. If you have a normal average salary your income tax will be somewhere between 40-50%. Yeah how does that feel? the goverment taking away half of the money you earn. The effect of the high income tax on the society is that the people does not want to work more than they have to (your tax will rise), fostering a anti-work mentality among the people becouse it does not pay to work more than you have to.
The goverment is also very good at wasting taxpayers money on non-productive things, like culture and endless and totaly useless goverment projects, bureaucracy, etc. Some examples:
If you are an artist like painter, writer or musican, the goverment will pay your living for the rest of your life! how about that?
If you are unemployed you can live as long as you want on goverment social welfare without any demands.
If you cant afford pay your rental for your appartment/house (too low income or to high rent) the goverment will give you free money each month for your rental.
For each child you have, you get free money each month from the goverment until they are 18 years old.
The goverment here is anti-business. There is alot of bureaucracy, paperwork, rules, laws that make it very hard and bothersome for the citizen to startup their own business to provide their own living. The goverment give unfair support (special tax rules, etc) to a minor number of very large corporates but suppress all mid-size/small companys with high taxes, fees and regularization.
Socialism is a hell and will only lead to doom in the long run, I have been living in it for 28 years so I should know.
As the result of socialism, our country has been deprecating slowly but surely since the middle of 1900. Crime and murder is skyrocketing, medicare is deprecating, education and schools are deprecating, corruption is on the rise (especialy among the polical elite, which use their political power to give their family and relatives advantages, their sons and daughters luxury apartments, free vacations/travel, free cars, etc on taxpayers money). We are soon one of the poorest countries in the europe in terms of salaries and purchasing power, germany, france, belgium, denmark, norway, they have all bypassed us during the last 20 years. We are in the bottom and its only getting worse every year.
It wasn't that bad !!!
Look at the GNP data. 1970-1973 was really good.
That's exactly the point. When the US
adopted Libertarianism in economics and
social policy; things went down a hole.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Dude, you might want to check your facts on that one. North Korea is a socialist dicatorship, which is about the same thing, or worse, to those who live there.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
1. You cannot disprove a negative (that capitalism is the only way to produce the current level of wealth). OTOH, I can turn that right around and say that certain characteristics that are considered "capitalistic" and "constitutionally democratic" have a very high correlation to a nation's wealth. So while I cannot disprove the possibility of a theoretically better way, I have yet to see anyone offer a better alternative.
2. The countries you site as example of failures of capitalism (Indonesia, Venezuela and Argentina) were highly corrupt, with very weak judicial systems, and certainly not well established capitalist countries. You are citing the failure of a system that these countries never did manage to implement. Rule of law is a very minimal requirement for capitalism to function, which is why capitalists are not anarchists. In order of incentives to work, the legal system has to be at least translucent and at least vaguely predictable. Oh yeah, and U of C economist would never recommend pegging a currency to the dollar.
3. The problem with your labeling of capitalism as eliteist is that the elite rich you seem to rail against are not the same people from year to year, just as the poor are a changing group. There is a large degree of income mobility, at least in the US, which are the statistics which I am most familiar with. Unlike a caste system, most people DON'T stay in one group through most of their lives.
4. Arguing about the "fairness" of the distribution of income is shortsighted and smacks of arrogance. First of all, who is the arbiter of what is fair? At what point does someone become elite? It's some much easier to make broad appeals that demonize vague groups than to cite a number. Why? Because the entire exercise in "fairness" is an entirely subjective and arbitrary exercise to begin with.
5. Question, would you rather have 1/2 of a personal sized pizza or 1/4 of a large full sized pizza? The point is that the relative size of the pie matters, not just one's share of the pie. Yeah some people are better off than others, but that is the price you pay to grow the pie. The only question for the people is, is my slice getting bigger, because that is really the only objective way for an individual to judge the success and failure of a system.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
This investment probably has to do with Europeans wanting Independence from the American market. This means that most military equipment will probably use AMD processors from now on.
I'm a Canadian. I lived in the USA for ten glorious years. My annual tax rate was below 30%, I made more money than I ever made in my previous 40 years of life, and five of the ten years were spent going to school.
Which reminds me, I was allowed to go to school! Couldn't meet the requirements in Canada (4.0 gpa or forget it, being black and female and/or gay wouldn't hurt), in the USA I just paid money and they taught me what I wanted to know. I got a licence and everything, and I'm no worse at my profession than any Canadian educated pratitioner.
Now I'm back in Canada. I can't work (yet)in my profession because of licencing regulations which don't recognise my US degree (even though they are screaming for more people in my profession here), the work I do have is taxed at a rate of 35%, and when you add all the other bullshit taxes I'm forking over about half my income. That'd be 50% dude. This cramps my style, as you might imagine.
Example, my 900 square foot house in Arizona cost $90,000 USD and the interest rate was 5%. It was the first house I ever owned at the age of 44, and it was cheaper than renting.
My house in Canada, which I was able to purchase by means of saving up those US greenbacks and trading them for Canadian dollars at the very best possible exchange rate, cost almost exactly twice as much even though it is the same size as the one in Arizona and was the cheapest thing I could get here.
Had I been working those ten years here in the Land of Regulated Markets, there's no way in hell I'd have been able to buy this house, or any house. None.
So the terrible evil factory owners in Eeeevile Amerika are stealing one fuck of a lot less from me than the morally upright socialists of wonderful Canada.
Put it another way, regulated markets work best for the ones doing the regulating.
And by the way. In the winter in Arizona, most of the young people on Harley Davidsons cruising up and down the mountain passes of Route 66, strutting about in Tombstone wearing biker leathers and big revlovers and enjoying the beautiful freedom are GERMAN TOURISTS. I bet it really pisses them off when they get back to Munich or Dresden and have to give up the bike and the hogleg. I know it pisses me off every day.
Socialists are deluded, man. America rocks. You should check it out.
I live in a socialist country in North America called Canada. Your description of Sweden matches Canada right down to the tax rates.
I was fortunate to live in the USA for ten years, which taught me what freedom tastes like. I'll be going back some day, when my children are grown.
They have their problems in the USA, but rampant crushing socialism isn't one of them just yet.
It's also being speculated that AMD is losing money on it's 64-bit chips. People just expect AMD chips to be cheaper than Intels, and probably wouldn't accept them otherwise.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.