Replies to post #72359 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Tiger64]

sgolds,

I think AMD will expand clean room area first allowing AMD to utilize FAB 36 for 100% production...plus I do not think single core manufacturing will go away entirely as charter might contribute as necessary...

[Not a Short]

Good questions but, I think, a few misconceptions:

2. Fab 36 and Fab 38 will both be 100% 65nm at some point. 90nm will be completely phased out by mid 2007.

4. Fab 30 will never close. There will be no point where Fab 36 is producing alone. Some 90nm lines will be taken down and other 65nm lines will be put up. At some point they will just change the name. No full plant shutdown is needed.

5. FAB 30 doesn't have too much 200mm equipment. Much of the equipment they bought was 300mm capable even though they are running 200mm wafers. There will be some leftover and I have no idea what they will do with it but they have spefically mentioned numberouse times how forward thinking they were with their equipment purchases. If need be I might be willing to google some links up but right now food is more on my mind :)


You might notice that my answer to 5 partially explains why they can convert fab 30 to fab 38 without shutting it completely down. Not as much machine replacement as you might have imagined.

[mas]

Fab36 will ramp 65nm asap and will take the load from Fab30 as 90nm ramps down. Fab36 and Chartered should take the slack from Fab30 as it is converted to Fab38 and that will be more capacity than Fab30 so marketshare won't be a problem if demand is there. As to capacity 45000 300mm wafers/m is like at least 3 times Fab 30's 30000 200mm wafers/m and that does not include Chartered so filling all that capacity maybe a bigger issue. It's going to get brutal out there will all this excess capacity chasing the same marketshare and you can imagine much cheaper mainstream prices as well as larger more expensive multi-core models at the high-end all chasing everybody's dollar.

[j3pflynn]

sgolds -

1) Since mas's post referenced a combined output of 45K 300mm WPM by the end of 2008, and Hans Deppe said he expects Fab36 to be at "20,000 wafers per month in the second half of 2007"( http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187000006), I guess it comes down to what the demand is and what they do with Chartered. Maybe they'll phase Chartered out as Fab38 comes fully on line? If they plan on phasing out Chartered by then, it sounds like they'd be approximately at parity; if not, then I guess Fab38 will be somewhat lower in production at that point in time than Fab36.

#2 2)Fab36 will go to 65nm soon, and I can't imagine Fab38 would start any larger than 65nm.

3) Purely by wafer size, two 300mm fabs would give you @4.5 times the capacity of current Fab30 output, and that doesn't take into account the 90nm->64nm transition or edge loss improvements. Pretty hard to try and be an oracle on what the product mix will look like from this point in time; heck, we don't even know what their next major product will completely look like, much less what the market may force by the time Fab38 comes online!

4)If and when Fab30 "closes", Chartered is also there with Fab36 to deal with the transition.

5) ? Your guess is surely as good as mine there.

[Not a Short]

Apology for sgolds:

From the talk on SI and looking at quotes from articles around the web it looks like I was wrong about Fab 30 not shutting down for conversion.

I'm sorry for implying you were the one with the misconception when it was really me...