Intel Corp (INTC)

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Re: I strongly got the impression that the 45nm wafer came from East Fishkill instead of Dresden, making it more of an IBM achievement IMHO.

It makes no difference, given the collaboration. If IBM can do it, so can AMD, at least within a reasonable time frame.

Re: They would not allow close-up photography or even close-up looks at the thing, but when I got a quick peek anyway it didn't look like big SRAM cells like Intels to me, more like test structures with some SRAM on it as well (but I could be wrong here, they wouldn't hold it still).

The die photo on Anandtech.com suggested it had some meat to it, but I'm sure it wasn't as large or developed as Intel's SRAM (Intel tends to exceed their own achievements year after year, their 90nm SRAM demo had 56Mb worth of SRAM, compared to AMD's 4Mb, for example). But even so, the biggest step is to actually tape out something and have a wafer to show for it. Of course, as Alan suggested, it doesn't mean the device was functional, or that there were any defect free die, or any of many possibilities. And given how coy AMD was about letting you view the wafer, it's clear indication that they have something to be ashamed of.

Re: All in all it seems more like they just wanted to show something, anything at all, in 45nm.

To be sure, they are under tremendous pressure to prove to Wall Street that Intel's perceived "last advantage left" can be overcome. So I can see the motive behind coming up with something half assed just to give a positive impression. Even so, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here, and suggest that they may be poised for a mid-2008 45nm ramp, which would be 6-9 months ahead of their previous generations.

Re: BTW the presentation said the wafer was made in January.

That doesn't mean anything. If they had started the wafer in January, that would still fall under the definition of being "made" in that month. It doesn't necessarily mean wafer out of the fab. And if it did, we would expect AMD to demo this wafer three months ago. My guess is that they taped out in January and got the wafers back the day before yesterday.