[Cialug] AMD's Spin Off

[David Champion]

Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
> What benefit will AMD get from this? All i know is that their 
> manufacturing is quite expensive, but design is not so much. Does 
> anyone think AMD is eventually just going to outsource production to 
> the lowest bidder? I mean, once production is a separate company, there 
> is no reason to continue doing business with them exclusively or even 
> at all.
>   
I don't know if you can say chip design isn't expensive...

I've talked to someone that has worked as an engineer at both Intel and 
AMD, as well as a few Silicon Valley startups. The man-hours involved in 
developing the next generation PC micro-processor is mind-boggling. Have 
you ever seen one of the wall-sized posters of chip?

He compared it to programming software - where if you get a system done, 
then have to re-do something at the beginning... instead of just making 
that one change, sometimes you have to scrap nearly the whole chip 
design and start over, because of how inter-connected it all is. And for 
every 1 finished chip design that makes it to market, there will be many 
iterations of it that make it all the way to prototype fabrication and 
testing. In software it's fairly easy to make a change and test it... in 
hardware, not so much. Granted, they have a lot of tools to simulate a 
new chip, but I'm sure things don't work 100% the same in simulation as 
they do in hardware.

-dc