AMD to make "significant corporate announcement" tomorrow, possibly breaking up
By Nilay Patel 
posted October 6th 2008 10:47PM
posted October 6th 2008 10:47PM
AMD just issued a release saying that president and CEO Dirk Meyer will be making a "significant corporate announcement" tomorrow, which sounds ominously like those breakup rumors are coming true -- particularly since Dirk's on record saying that the chipmaker plans to spin off manufacturing and fabrication into a new company. We'll see in the morning -- anyone planning on throwing a blowout "last night of the old AMD" party in the meantime?Update: The WSJ confirms it's a breakup -- but don't worry, they'll still be friends. [Thanks, aztalon]
Update 2: Official PR is here. How's "AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company of Abu Dhabi to Create New Leading-Edge Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Mubadala increases investment in financially-stronger AMD, which is simultaneously unlocking the value of its manufacturing assets" for an exciting title?
Abu Dahbi? isn't that where Garfield always sends Nermal? Maybe Nermal is going to save AMD
Is not possible that they are leaving the business, maybe they will change the brand name of maybe there is a marketing thing...
OH NOOOESSSS!!! The Japanese took over the car market (Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, etc... beating US manufacturers in sales right now) and now the middle east is taking over our technology sector!!!! We can't let this happen!!!
;)
You guys have probably forgotten anything more than 10 years old....as far as Intel pricing goes. in Nov 1997, I had to dish out $5400 on a new PC. I still remember what the CPU, a Pentium II 300Mhz The CPU alone cost me.... are you ready?....
$1987.00
So if you guys think that Intel is not run by the same greedy people that gave us the sub-prime mess then your head is not in the right
place.
Intel has the technology to get is i7's at 4Ghz and beyond very soon... but are not pushed to do so because there isn't anyone in the Market to beat them to it. We really need AMD to bring the best out of both those 2 corps and get us fast and cheap CPU's...
HAH!! AMD is the reason the subprime mess the US is in! How much are they losing per month now?! How much do they owe by buying ATI?? It could be a toxic asset!!
This announcement is actually a good thing and a common (though not ubiquitous) model in recent years.
By splitting AMD manufacturing off from the design company, each side achieves a benefit. The design side can be more flexible in what it produces, including changing volumes and even sourcing parts to other companies if required, rather than being responsible for keeping the fab full.
The fab, on the other hand, can do a better job at remaining full by accepting jobs in foundry mode from a variety of companies, including those that might have been competitors with the former AMD incarnation. By extending its alliance partnership with IBM, it will continue to leverage the cost savings of sharing R&D with a group of partners as well. Since this new arm will be building a new plant in Saratoga, NY, this sharing will be more productive, allowing for even closer comingling of the engineering talent (AMD has engineers on IBM premises today, but there is a lot of potential for even deeper interaction with a large number of permanently-resident engineers sitting in an AMD NY facility).
ATTENTION!! To all of you who have failed or cheated your way through high school reading classes you need to go back and make up that course because the majority of you just DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ!!
I highly suggest that you click on the link, read every word (that means word for word to those of you who have a hard time understanding). Yes I know there are no pictures and it's paragraphs long but maybe if most of you learned how to read stories and books at an early age instead of comics and television it would not be so hard for most of you to look at.
If you read AMD Is NOT DYING or GETTING OUT OF THE MARKET AT ALL. In fact they are splitting into more partnerships in order to STRENGTHEN their role in the semiconductor world. If any of you knew anything about AMD you would know that AMD's strengths lie in their partnerships with other firms and companies, which also means they will soon utilize the same resources as IBM which means much stronger competition. This is simply a much larger execution of just that. They are not a closed in company like Intel.
Now if most of you can learn to read things like this report on their website instead of rumors, and misguided information then maybe you might actually learn something.
Sheesh it's no wonder the educational scale in the USA ranks very low when compared to other countries, even developing countries.
"AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Company of Abu Dhabi to Create New Leading-Edge Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Mubadala increases investment in financially-stronger AMD, which is simultaneously unlocking the value of its manufacturing assets"
...or NAMBLA for short.
(Thank you, Jon Stewart!)
Check out ATIC's website
http://www.advancedtechnologyic.com/
The Foundry Company
http://www.newglobalfoundry.com/
hopefully this is the right direction for AMD, I was expecting an announcement for a $99 X2 6400+ ;)
or a Phenom X4 10050 at 2.7Ghz ;)
Just for some of you chuckheads who are still having a hard time reading through the first paragraph, not understanding what is in the text, or for some of you even more illiterate ignorant fools that still think that this is a case of "intel wins and AMD is dead", here is a more grade 3 level simplified explanation of what is happening to AMD.
"AMD CEO Dirk Meyer explained that the company's fab spinoff means AMD will be able to develop new products without having to invest billions in new chip-making technology and plant capacity. "It will make AMD financially strong and more tightly focused," Meyer said."
Now if you can actually read this and read the entire explanation on AMD's website you can see that this is big. And by that I mean that this is big in a way that Intel, and NV should start becoming scared in the coming years once everything goes into full production. AMD may not have had much resources in the past in perfecting their CPU's and such, now with this whole thing happening they will now have more than adequate resources available at their disposal with companies such as IBM to not only compete with intel, but concentrate even harder on the Fusion, as well as their server/desktop CPU's and having even better ATI Graphics cards. Also once this goes through they will no longer have to worry about huge costs to them on inve$ting a ton of borrowed debt $$ in a new plant or making new chip designs. Without all of that excess overhead they can concentrate on cranking out really great products.
Time will show that having partnerships like this will prove a company to be a lot more cost efficient than having everything in-house.
It's funny how some of you people want Intel to be a monopoly.
First CPU I bought was an AMD 486DX4 100mhz.
I TRULY hope that not only will this help with the cash flow but that the sale also included a 5year deal to produce x amount of chips per year so that there is a chance that we will still have the AMD CPU in the pipeline for a while, and hopefully long enough for us in a few years to wowed back with a super chip at a super cheap price, we KNOW they can do it, history has shown them to fade down a bit before coming out with A** kicking chips.