[Cialug] AMD's Spin Off

[John Lengeling]

Intel's Ronler Acres plant is across the street from our headquarters in
Hillsboro Oregon.  It is huge site and cost multiple billions, with a B,
of dollars:

http://www.intel.com/community/oregon/campus/ronler_acres.htm 

Most companies (smaller than Intel or IBM) just contract with a fab to
manufacturer their chips.   Sun has been doing this for years for their
SPARC.  It is all to avoid the high investment in dollars.  You must
have very high volumes or high chip complexity in order to justify the
cost.

IBM (PowerPC), Motorola/Freescale (PowerPC & Motrola), DEC (Alpha) all
had their own fabs...I don't know if they still do any more...