Replies to post #1211 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Spokeshave, you have a very reasonable picture of AMD's operations (or any semi's operations, for that matter). I believe that AMD's full capacity is probably somewhat close to what they have been producing during the past few quarters. I don't expect AMD to be able to produce the same 8M units per quarter that they did when they had the Austin fab as an auxiliary. For this reason, AMD's market share prospects are limited, so I can see why they are concentrating on higher margin segments of the market to put their capacity to its best use. When you look at things this way, they make a lot more sense.

Regards,

[Elmer Phud]

Spokeshave -

As with most production processes, yields start off lower and increase as the process matures, yet you are assigning a mature yield figure to all processes. I am certain that the overall weighted average yield for the fab is quite a bit lower than the figure you use. It is completely unreasonable to assume that all concurrent processes are producing excellent yields.

I'm not assuming any such thing. Allow me to say it a different way. AMD is capable of supplying the demand for their .13u Athlon derivatives with half their fab capacity, assuming good yields and binsplits. That is a mature process and runs mature products. While Barton may be a new version of the design, the defect density doesn't know what product is being produced on a wafer so for a mature process the yield is more a function of the process, not the design.

This leaves about half the fab's capacity available. As I showed before, AMD could produce about 100K units for immediate delivery at September "release" of Athlon64 by using just 55 wafers a week with normal yield or 100 or so if poor to bad yield. Yet people here claim immediate availability won't happen. Why? It would still leave about 2700 wafers per week in capacity available for process development and other forms of unproductive activity. AMD still has a development fab in Santa Clara/Sunnyvalle so process development goes on there as well.

The point is that if Athlon64 is not in production today, it can not be because of lack of capacity and whatever problems prevent if from being manufacturable at this time would likely affect Opteron as well. Just a guess on my part, I admit, but that's my take on it.

EP