[Cialug] AMD's Spin Off

[Josh More]

I have a friend who designs chips for Intel.  Designing chips is
cheap... when you compare the cost to building fabs.

It's like how rocket fuel for the space shuttle is cheap, when compared
to the cost of building the shuttle and launchpad system.  Or how a home
mortgage is cheap when compared to an industry bailout plan.

There are a lot of chip designers that outsource the actual chip
building to other companies.  AMD is just joining their ranks.



-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> David Champion <dchampion at visionary.com> 10/09/08 10:15 AM >>>
Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
> What benefit will AMD get from this? All i know is that their 
> manufacturing is quite expensive, but design is not so much. Does 
> anyone think AMD is eventually just going to outsource production to 
> the lowest bidder? I mean, once production is a separate company,
there 
> is no reason to continue doing business with them exclusively or even 
> at all.
>   
I don't know if you can say chip design isn't expensive...

I've talked to someone that has worked as an engineer at both Intel and 
AMD, as well as a few Silicon Valley startups. The man-hours involved in

developing the next generation PC micro-processor is mind-boggling. Have

you ever seen one of the wall-sized posters of chip?

He compared it to programming software - where if you get a system done,

then have to re-do something at the beginning... instead of just making 
that one change, sometimes you have to scrap nearly the whole chip 
design and start over, because of how inter-connected it all is. And for

every 1 finished chip design that makes it to market, there will be many

iterations of it that make it all the way to prototype fabrication and 
testing. In software it's fairly easy to make a change and test it... in

hardware, not so much. Granted, they have a lot of tools to simulate a 
new chip, but I'm sure things don't work 100% the same in simulation as 
they do in hardware.

-dc


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