Quote Originally Posted by vitaminc View Post
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In semiconductor manufacturing, size is an absolute requirement for technological advance. And so far the only 3 players that are poised to compete are Intel, Samsung and TSMC. All of them are a majority market share leader of their own.

While the 45nm productions in TSMC is still in small quantities, they do have actual production samples for Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. AMD? As you suggested its still a good 3 months away.

Please cut the bullcrap about 'highly complex chips' as the design/manufacturing requirement for all chips are different, i.e., Intel's process would probably go kaboom if its used for flash manufacturing.
As a matter of fact Intel does flash on its older FABs ( n-1 and n-2 ).As I've said it is a matter of marring the process to the design.
Intel typically goes for the highest performance possible for its transistors , as a result others generally manage to outpace them in cell density at a given process node.

AMD could probably get a dedicated fab at TSMC with tweaked process too. AFAIK, Spansion has a dedicated TSMC fab in Tainan, Taiwan, for flash and Omnivision has a dedicated TSMC line for its specialty CMOS image sensor process.
That's highly unlikely IMO.At best , AMD could get some lines inside a FAB , they need the newest process anyway.And it's a problem of capacity.

I must say I'm extremely surprised at TSMC going SOI for AMD; I thought if anything it will mean AMD transitioning some of its CPU products to bulk.