Behind the Closed Doors of AMD's Chip Production

rokali writes "Tom's Hardware is running an article on AMD's chipmaking procedure, plants, and future. Check out the pictures of Fab 36, their new plant slated to open in 2006, which will put of the next generation of 65nm chips. From the article: 'Currently, AMD's devices in Dresden are still produced on 200 mm wafers; the new APM 3.0 using 300 mm wafers won't be ramped up until Fab 36 opens. Production startup at the new facility is slated for the beginning of 2006, at which point the company will have invested an additional $2.5 billion.'"

Comments

Question

[elid]

Incentives from the German government and the EU have lured a number of high-tech firms to the Saxony region of Germany, many of which have formed alliances. AMD, Infineon and ZMD work particularly closely together.

Anyone know anything about this? What makes Dresden so interesting to AMD?

Re:Motherboards

[ad0gg]

They used to have their own chipset and it sucked(speedwise and feature wise) compared to the VIA chipset that was out at the same time. AMD doesn't need its own chipset now since Nvidia makes a really great chipset.

Chipsets would suffice

[toadlife]

Back when AMD still made chipsets for their own chips, the motherboards that used them were incredibly stable. I wish they hadn't stopped making them.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[evilviper]

A single G5 will run you about $1500,

Okay, but the Opteron in question is a DUAL-CORE chip, for servers only (desktop chips are much less expensive), still unreleased, and it's only the MSRP, whereas the real price you can buy them for will surely be lower.

Besides, that is the high-end Opteron. The low-end dual-core chip is the 165 for $637.

4 XServes be cheapter to assemble, run, and maintain than the processors used to make one 8-way Opteron server.

Yes, but people that need an 8-way system can't just use 4x 2-way systems, otherwise they'd be doing that! Just as people that bought a 64-bit system so they could use 16GBs of memory, can't just have 4GBs of RAM in 4 different systems instead...

If they wanted the equivalent of an XServe, they'd be going with lower-end Opterons, such as the $637 one. The parent even said as much in the first sentence, which you completely ignored. Show me an 8-way G5 system, and then you can compare prices...