AMD In Early Talks To Make Chips At Intel Foundry (tomshardware.com) 27
"Your AMD chips may have Intel Inside soon," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "Discussions are underway between the two companies to move an undisclosed amount of AMD's chip business to Intel foundries. (AMD currently does their production through TSMC.) The talks come hot on the heels of a flurry of other Intel investments." Tom's Hardware reports: In the past several weeks, Intel has seen a flurry of activity and investments. The United States announced a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel, while Softbank bought $2 billion worth of shares. Alongside Nvidia, Intel announced new x86 chips using Nvidia graphics technology, with the graphics giant also purchasing $5 billion in Intel shares. There have also been reports that Intel and Apple have been exploring ways to work together. The article notes that there is a trade/political dimension to an AMD-Intel deal as well: It makes sense for Intel's former rivals -- especially American companies -- to consider coming to the table. The White House is pushing for 50% of chips bound for America to be built domestically, and tariffs on chips aren't off the table. Additionally, doing business with Intel could make the US government, Intel's largest shareholder, happy, which can be good for business. AMD faced export restrictions on its GPUs earlier this year as the US attempted to throttle China's AI business.
picking winners and preparing for war (Score:2, Informative)
Make everything your war machine needs here, by tariff. Pick the winners in this game.
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I'm waiting for these clowns to screw up bad enough that even their fans have to realize they are bozos with snake oil (or on snake oil). For example, let him nuke a hurricane and then have to evacuate two South Eastern states because of radiation risk.
My fault, I jinxed Intel (Score:1)
As soon as I purchased Intel stock, they lost their mojo.
Is AMD Making Potato Chips? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, there it is! AMD, blink twice if you're doing this against your will. I guess they can always produce a bunch of low-end chips nobody cares about on Intel's fabs and Trump won't know the difference.
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There are a lot more low-end chips made than whatever the gamers think they need.
Some Apple products have modest CPUs too (Score:2)
There are a lot more low-end chips made than whatever the gamers think they need.
It true on the Apple side too. For example the iPhone SE models use older chips. Another possible opportunity for Intel.
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The intent is not to produce results - it's to produce the appearance of results.
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What is the sales breakdown for a company like AMD?
I would imagine that sales of the cutting edge parts are a tiny niche catering to enthusiasts and tech companies.
Even a highend computer has a number of support chips which don't need to be fabbed on the latest process.
Sales of mid to low range equipment are MUCH higher than the top models. Most users don't buy the cutting edge equipment, they buy in the sweet spot of the price/performance curve. Corporate bulk purchases also do the same - either looking fo
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The sales breakdown for AMD is available in their quarterly reports, assuming you understand their product lineup:
https://www.amd.com/en/newsroo... [amd.com]
(Q3 numbers aren't out yet)
If you dig into the revenue statements per department, you'll see that their datacentre segment (which is EPYC CPUs, MI accelerators, and . . . pretty much that's it) is their greatest source of income. At least in the case of EPYC, the real revenue driver is Zen5/Turin which is their current cutting-edge server/workstation CPU. On de
Re: Is AMD Making Potato Chips? (Score:2)
"I would imagine that sales of the cutting edge parts are a tiny niche catering to enthusiasts and tech companies"
You seem to have a basic lack of understanding about processor technology. Don't feel too bad, I have seen several other comments in this thread where they make the same mistake.
Nobody wants to sell chips made on an old process for multiple reasons. Not only performance and power efficiency, which matters a whole lot since laptops have proliferated, but also because you get more chips per wafer.
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Yeah basically. You don't even have to scrap the parts, just push your worst-of-the-worst onto an Intel node (or whatever) and sell them at a ridiculously low price which is what you were going to do with the TSMC-based parts anyway.
AMD still produces some Zen2-era CPUs/SoCs, so stuff like that could be put on some Intel node as a tariff dodge. Instead of sending the volume to Samsung.
Meanwhile, the Samsung fab in AZ is not gonna be happy about this. Unless using a Samsung fab in AZ also helps AMD dodge
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Companies already produce more than half their chips using subpar technologies. It's called having a product "range". You don't need the latest technology to produce the lowend products, which also tend to make up the bulk of sales volume.
Also this restriction is only for products sold in the US, and foreign companies selling in the US are subject to even greater restrictions. Products sold by US companies to foreign markets are not subject to this at all so it's making US companies more competitive domesti
Re:Is AMD Making Potato Chips? (Score:4, Informative)
You only need the top fab for the high end chips, but those chips also sell in relatively small numbers.
There are also millions of lowend processors sold every year. Most people don't buy cutting edge computers, especially the large fleets of corporate machines. Then there are all the support chips and embedded controllers.
Having a second tier fab, especially one that is not subject to import tariffs is extremely useful for a large number of product lines.
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Intel fabs have been struggling for years and they're barely keeping up with TSMC and yet AMD is going to use them to build their processors?
Intel fabs haven't been struggling in all ways, only some. Specifically they have trouble getting down to the next node size to compete with TSMC. The thing is, not all actively manufactured processes use the smallest node size. In fact most CPUs don't use it at all. Intel has precisely zero problems with its fabs producing last gen, lower end stuff.
I do not plan to ever buy another Intel machine (Score:4, Interesting)
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Govt jobs used to enjoy some level of job security. That's all out the window now, thanks to Doge.
The investment makes sense to me... (Score:2)
Sure, the tariffs are doing their work here, but it's not just that.
If you have to go to one and only company to make your products, you are at the mercy of what they want to charge you and they will extract as much profit out of you as possible. TSMC is almost in that position right now and Intel is the best hedge against that happening. So what if some of this is government pressure to keep advanced fabs in the US. Fine by me.
The real wrinkle here is when for demand for AI compute contracts (or just colla
Given Intel's history of "love" towards AMD ,,, (Score:2)
,,, if I were AMD, I'd be very wary of making any part of my business dependent upon Intel.
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The Wall Street crowd is stupid (Score:2)
This is a bit of stupidity that those on Wall Street came up with to try to keep Intel stock from crashing. With the history between the companies, there is NO way that AMD would trust that Intel wouldn't steal their IP if AMD were to use Intel fabs. Based on the previous talk from Intel CEOs, why would AMD bail out Intel by using their unproven new fab processes ANYWAY.
AMD may have asked for something like prices just to keep Trump from doing more unconstitutional crap to attack the company, but Inte
"could make the US government happy" (Score:2)
So what? The .gov shouldn't be a shareholder of anything.