Tuesday, October 23, 2007

"Tick" - the clock is ticking


Source: 2007 Intel Spring Analyst Meeting


Source: 2007 Fall IDF

This morning, Intel sent out this press release announcing the opening of its first, high-volume 45nm leading edge microprocessor manufacturing facility in Chandler, AZ.

Fab 32 is the 2nd factory in Intel's fab network to produce 45nm processors, following the D1D Hillsboro, OR facility which manufactured the first 45nm processors in January, 2007.

Fab 28, in Kiryat Gat, Israel and Fab 11x in Rio Rancho, NM will produce 45nm microprocessors in 2008, rounding Intel's 45nm factory network.

Intel's 45nm High-k manufacturing process will be used to produce Penryn and Nehalem based processor designs.

It is rumored that on November 12, Intel will observe one minute of silence in remembrance of AMD, as "rev 10h" is officially inducted into Justin Rattner's Dustbin of Obsolete Technology.

Oh, and one more thing. Today 10/25 was also the one year anniversary of the acquisition of ATI by AMD. In celebration of the event, the Inquirer's Theo Vallich wrote this piece in memory of the ill-fated union. Was it worth it? Theo writes:

"Time will tell if Hector and Dirk screwed things up or not. All we know is that AMD's market cap today is at the levels of ATI Technologies alone (at ATI's finest hour), meaning around 15 billion dollars of shareholder value got wiped over the course of a single year.

Joint market cap was around 20.87 billion USD - Daamit is now valued at 6.99 billion USD. ยต"

Hmm...maybe not :)

10/26 Update: besides reporting lackluster support for AMD's Black Edition from motherboard makers in this article, DIGITIMES reported that AMD will launch its first Phenom quad-core processors on November 20. Techspot reckons that if the rumor is correct, Phenoms at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz will 512K L2 per core and 2M shared L3 will be peddled. This will not be enough to compete against Intel's Penryn based monsters.