AMD cuts to the core with 'Bulldozer' Opterons

[flippin_waffles]

WOW! So GF giving you guys the chips for free? I know you want to make it sound like it's all positive to go fabless but reality is very different since you are paying per wafer, die whatever and at a premium and GF will now have their own priorities that may not go inline with Amd's so they could push out process shrinks out if they see it in their best interest. I have to wonder how much you are really saving by losing control of your manufacturing and I would love to hear what your old CEO/founder Mr. Sanders feels about Amd's new fabless model.

I don't think AMD will be paying the equivilant of the $4-5 Billion on wafers, that it costs to build and equip a fab and develop a new process.

What i'm wondering, is what intel plans to do with all their under utilized fabs and employees if and when they fall below %70 market share, and margins start to drop along with them. AMD is much leaner and already at a point where they can operate on much lower margins. intel may have to make some adjustments in their business model also. I'm sure they're preparing to avoid that with whatever means necessary. Here's a few past examples of how they might accomplish that, taken from another forum:

I'm curious as to what the rules are... Are they written down somewhere? Because by my own ethics meter, I dislike Intel precisely because of the shady crap they've pulled over the 25 or so years I've been in the inudstry. I went from proudly buying my then top-of-the-line 80486DX (50mhz!!) to generally not trusting and at times loathing them.

-The FDIV controversy. If your product is broken, offer to fix it, without the initial public statements of, "You have to prove your CPU is broken and that you actually use your FPU before we'll fix it." (Yes, they backed off on this, but if they'd done the 'right' thing to start with, then we'd be talking about it as a shining example of a company doing the honorable thing rather than the inverse, 16 years later.
-Threatening MB and chipset makers to not use a technically superior product (I'm talking about the K7 launch and the fact that there MB manufacturers were afraid to show a product supporting the K7, and the ones they did did so without markings on the box
-Doing a demo of a 3D game with one of the first dedicated 3D processors (3DFX in this case), which was responsible for a dramatic improvement in the gaming experience, and suggesting via demo that the difference was the anemic (at the time) CPU extensions
-Bribing manufacturers to not use a superior part from a competitor (Dell payoffs, Opteron)
-Changing a benchmark suite by removing the portions of the benchmark that your competitor wins (sysmark 2000 and 2001 fiascos)
-Refusing to use supported extensions on competitor's CPUs

The problem with consumers is, we have a very long memory when it comes to things like this. To this day I still don't use TurboTax, after that DRM stunt they pulled a few years back.

to name a few

http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/s...t=1226&page=27