What amd owns is performance, but cannot do what intel can do when it comes to cutting price which is why intel has the budget slot...
The performance end is where the big profits lie. Intel would rather change places with AMD on which end of the market they "own".
AMD is selling everything they
can produce. They don't have the ability to make as many chips as they could sell (unlike Intel) due to lack of production facilities. They therefore have to choose where to compete and where to yield the market to Intel. They target the high profit areas. Servers, laptops and high end desktops. The low end chips are often sold below cost so owning that market is expensive to Intel, which is why in the past they allowed AMD to own it (and lose money). AMD is maximizing their profits to pay off debts and prepare for taking a larger market share as they expand their ability to manufacture CPUS.
With luck when the 3rd party foundry begins kicking out chips (in the midrange I expect) AMD will have a strong presence in all the areas they can make money and can push ahead on making more production facilities quicker (or revamping old ones that can't make current CPUs).
One way AMD can increase capacity is to use fewer transisters per CPU. Fewer transisters means a higher yield on functional and faster CPUs as well as lower power usage. It also means smaller chips which results in more chips yielded per wafer. The obvious way to do that is less memory on the chip (resulting in lower performance). A less obvious way is to keep the quantity of memory but decrease they number of transistors to make it. To that end they licensed a new memory technology (link below)
Link to articleThe embedded memory is a good fit with AMD, which has moved all its microprocessor production over to SOI manufacturing processes. ISi (Santa Clara, Calif.) has claimed that Z-RAM can achieve five times the density of embedded SRAM, the conventional memory choice for on-chip caches, and twice the density of embedded DRAM.
They
could decrease the transistors for memory to 20% and greatly increase their output. Or they could increase the cache 5 fold for a performance increase. Alternately they could do a little of both - more cache for servers and high end desktops fewer transistors for the lower end and laptops. All while increasing market share and decreasing manufacturing costs without a major cash outlay or decreasing profit margins.
This memory technology requires a silicon on insulator process. Intel does not use that process - AMD does. So potentially AMD could very substantially increase their output if they can integrate this into their CPUs as they apparently plan. An advantage that AMD may be able to take that intel cannot without licensing the process technology for SOI from IBM and building new facilities to use it, which means a minimum 2 year gap for AMD to make use of it.
Topic: Of Proccessers and GHz... (Read 9880 times)