IBM Reportedly Starts Producing Chips for AMD

AMD disclosed during a recent analyst event that the chip maker has started manufacturing processors in IBM’s foundries in a possible attempt to try to boost production of its upcoming A-Series Trinity APUs.

“We win together, we have partnership in good times and in difficult times. What we are seeing is a focus on execution running test chips through the [production] line to gather the data [...] with partners from IBM and Globalfoundries,” said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD.

Traditionally, AMD’s processors and APUs were manufactured by Globalfoundries, an independent semiconductor foundry which was created in March of 2009, after AMD spun off its chip fabrication business.

Despite the close partnership between the two companies, all throughout 2011, AMD complained about the performance of Globalfoundries, since the latter faced all soft of production issues with its leading edge fabrication technologies.

These yield issues even led AMD to revise its chip fabrication deal with Globalfoundries in April last year, in order to pay only for the working chips manufactured by the foundry (previously AMD paid for every wafer Globalfoundries produced, no matter the number of functional chips it contained).

According to Xbit Labs, AMD’s decision to start producing chips at IBM is expected to boost its ability to compete in terms of volume with Intel.

This increase in manufacturing capacity should come as a huge help for AMD’s next-gen Trinity APUs, which target a wide range of market segments, from ultrathin notebooks to desktops.

AMD's next-generation APU combines either two or four processing cores based on the Bulldozer architecture, with a VLIW4 GPU derived from the Cayman graphics used inside the Radeon HD 6900 series.

According to AMD, these changes are expected to provide up to 50% more compute performance than Llano, superior entertainment potential, longer battery-life and better graphics. Both the desktop and the notebook Trinity APUs are scheduled to arrive at the middle of this year.