Nico Speaks
By Van Smith
Date: July 18, 2001
In a continuation of another story we wrote today, our friend Nico Ernst of tecchannel.de has written us with more thoughts about AMD's SOI process:
Seeing that AMD is playing with SOI transistors since November to me does not mean they are starting a "conversion." But as Fab30 is always under construction I'm pretty sure they can deliver SOI CPUs whenever they want to. Read: When the market demands it. To me the make-it-or-break-it event for AMD will be next MP Forum. If they don't at least hint to a new architecture there, then they'll have to squeeze as many MHz out of poor Athlon as they can. Until now it scales well (much better than P3 did), but for how much longer? After all, it's still K7.
In other news: I hear AMD wants to make Fab25 a flash-only plant. So, all Athlons might be "made in Germany" soon ;-)
It might be possible for AMD to move more of its Athlon/Duron production to Dresden as they shift to a 0.13 micron process. Die sizes will be reduced and Dresden's capacity continues to increase.
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