Replies to post #24840 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Wouter Tinus]

Just to score a couple PR points against their competitor?

Don't underestimate AMD's corporate culture, it's highly focussed on beating Intel.

[smooth2o]

So, AMD had 65nm in 2005, is sandbagging, can produce QC on 65 now? It's you AMD types that said AMD could have a viable QC product on 90nm. Now that Intel is showing 65nm QC on Friday it's now a waste of time. Makes a lot of sense.

Smooth

[wbmw]

Re: Why would they waste the time/$$/energy on tapeout, masks, etc. on a product they will never sell (90nm QC)? Just to score a couple PR points against their competitor?

The other benefit is to do a trial design and flush out any bugs in order to enable a quicker time to market at 65nm. In other words, if they really wanted a quad core design as early as possible, they would make it first at 90nm, do their validation, then do a dumb shrink. Their work on the first part would be able to be started earlier, and their work on the second part would be cut in half. Yes, it costs more money, but the time to market advantage can be financially justified.

Re: AMD must have some sort of functional 65nm process now and must have had one in '05 in order to have demonstrated them "behind closed doors".

My thought is either that the closed doors demos were on 90nm, or they never existed in the first place. I do not believe the 'Droid notion that AMD has something that "they can launch whenever they want to", but simply choose to keep it in their back pocket. It's absurd. And even if it were a yield issue, they would launch it today at $5000 per CPU, just to keep volumes small and have it as a PR play. No way would they hold something back if they had it, especially with Intel making as much noise as they are.