Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

According to some accounts, it is at least 3 or 4 times more "manufacturable" that Itanium.

That would very uneducated accounts. The Opteron has many
cost/yield/manufacturing disadvantages compared to Madison:

- SOI processing
- less mature process
- more interconnect layers
- high speed I/F needs new ATE investment; likely source
of non-trivial parametric yield loss

The only advantage of Opteron is it's about half the die
size of the Madison. But if you compare compare critical
die size (the area of the chip occupied by non redundancy
protected structures and circuits) the two chips are much
closer in effectice size for yield considerations than raw
size indicates.