Alan: Correction, Intel is the solo act.
I agree that IBM seems to be falling behind. The SOI process doesn't seem to have the future of strained silicon. IBM needs to stay somewhat at the forefront in order to protect their position in the market, but surely this is not a viable business unit. Any way they can get someone like Chartered, Intel, or AMD to be interested in thier process technology helps to fund the enormous costs. Even for IBM it's significant. I don't think there is much more to it than that. IBM can't be interested in AMD as a source for product, but it doesn't hurt to hedge your bet, either.
Intel is coming out as the only high volume mfg of uP for the distant future. I don't see anyone keeping up, or catching up with them. IBM certainly doesn't want to be in the uP business. That said,Intel's decisions seem to be the result of massive R&D evaluation. They stated (three years ago) that the reason for moving to P4 was that in order to ramp the frequencies of operation they needed much smaller discrete circuitry. If true, AMD should have problems keeping up with future process improvements and performance. I see Intel moving waaay ahead of AMD in 2-3 years. Next year, AMD might have a chance at grabbing some market share, but many other ducks need to be ordered for that to happen.
As far as the IBM/AMD relationship being fruitful, well, first, it will cost AMD (guessing) $500M to participate. Nothing with IBM is cheap or easy. I remember the MOT/IBM relationship as difficult. First, IBM always "forgot" to mention some item that was critical to the process, and IBM always kept them 6 months behind the lastest innovation. Add that 6 months to the timeline for AMD product. That's IF it produces something very useful.
TI has decided to center on the DSP market and although their process technology is excellent, they don't seem to have as good a strategy as Intel who is trying to participate in all markets with theirs. If Intel is successful with this, and the market takes off again aka CES products ideas, AND Intel figures out how to raise prices without intervention... watch out!
The only bump in the road seems to be how to market the "new" technology of Banias vs Athlon. But I'm not worried about that, knowing Intel's marketing power.
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