AMD Denies Selling its Fabs

Responding to various comments that appeared on several websites AMD said that it will not sell off its chip-producing factories although their financial situation is far from being impressive. AMD's market share has plummeted since the mass release of Core 2 CPUs and things are getting worse every day. R600 chips came out late and they cannot outperform Nvidia's cards. As for Barcelona, who knows? However...

"...Dresden remains technologically most advanced manufacturing facility and the cornerstone of AMD's processor manufacturing. Nothing will change here. Different reports miss any base and are complete rumors. The same applies to appropriate analyst reports. In order to make it completely clear, we expressed once: 'only real men have fabs'," claims AMD.

Nice one, isn't it? And when you think about it, the claim has less substance than it may seem. At the moment AMD holds about 8% of the server market and its quota is still going down even if Opterons are cheaper than Xeons. Furthermore they could rely on TSMC and UMC for chip production. Nvidia's GPUs are just fine and they too come out of the same manufacturing facilities that weren't good enough for AMD.

Unofficial data reveals the fact that AMD considers these chip manufacturers to have only general CPU/GPU layouts that cannot offer the required quality index for a proper AMD CPU die implementation. That may be true but Nvidia and Ati's GPUs were perfect and if you look at the internal architecture of a GPU you will notice that it's far more advanced than a CPU with the same die surface. So I don't get it. Not for now, at least.

And the there's Barcelona, Phenom and all the "native" quad-cores that should have been released months ago. What about them? AMD says that first Barcelona-based CPUs will be released in Mid-August but I don't think they will live up to their promises. They've already delayed it twice and I have a feeling that when they eventually come out, INTEL will be waiting around the corner with 3GHz Penryns. And that can't be good for business.

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