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AMD, Nvidia Reportedly Tripped Up On Process Shrinks
itwbennett writes: In the fierce battle between CPU and GPU vendors, it's not just about speeds and feeds but also about process shrinks. Both Nvidia and AMD have had their move to 16nm and 20nm designs, respectively, hampered by the limited capacity of both nodes at manufacturer TSMC, according to the enthusiast site WCCFTech.com. While AMD's CPUs are produced by GlobalFoundaries, its GPUs are made at TSMC, as are Nvidia's chips. The problem is that TSMC only has so much capacity and Apple and Samsung have sucked up all that capacity. The only other manufacturer with 14nm capacity is Intel and there's no way Intel will sell them some capacity.
Build your own fab
Who didn't see not having their own fabs was going to bite them in the rear?
Only a bunch of bean counters would not have seen this coming.
NVidia has always been fabless, but AMD owned its own fabrication plants until a few years ago... when they were spun off into a separate company called Global Foundries.
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it wouldn't surprise me if someone at Intel Legal has written up an "AMD/Foundry Contract Opinion.doc" and squirreled it away somewhere.
Or they can take advantage of the situation to acquire nVidia's market position in GPU computing and patent arsenal (to annihilate the trolls - probably not gunning for AMD). Intel wants a viable AMD, to keep DoJ off its back. nVidia is just a market competitor with a manufacturing problem.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Riiiight. Because Intel never ever sells fab capacity.
AMD going to Intel for fab capacity is like the Palestinians going to the Israelis for rocket technology.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The ultimate story about the dangers of outsourcing is how Nokia destroyed its mobile phone business. Once upon a time Nokia and Texas Instruments had a very close working arrangement with TI being Nokia's fab partner. The two together had a complete phone solution. So how does Nokia treat TI in the mid 2000s: They decided to diversify their wireless chipset providers away from working with TI. Only Nokia forgot one thing: TI don't play in markets where it cannot be overall #1. TI will as fast as possible get out of business segments where it cannot lead. And so TI said to Nokia, bye by 2012. In 2009. By then Nokia had decided it wanted to get its ARM SoCs and wireless modems from the same supplier, and there was one natural candidate, especially since they were, and still are, the leaders in LTE: Qualcomm. Only there was one big problem: Nokia had been caught in a patent war with Qualcomm for years trying to put Qualcomm out of business. It was Nokia that wound up having to settle for billions of US dollars, and suddenly it was at the mercy of the company to whom it had been an existential threat. Oops.
Actually oil companies have been exporting crude products abroad (They still can't legally export unrefined crude oil) for a few years now because they can make more selling them in other countries. In fact this past June some restrictions were lifted and they started exporting unrefined ultralight oil
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
As of September 2014:
-AMD's available cash: $950 million
-AMD's market capitalization: $2.6 billion
-AMD's credit rating: Absolute garbage
-Cost of a new Intel/TSMC style fab: $7 billion - $10 billion
It's a nice thought, but the reason that so many companies, including huge companies like Apple, IBM, and Qualcomm, have gone fabless is that fabs are astonishingly, mind-blowingly, expensive.