Chartered slated to ship chips for AMD from July: source
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Contract chip maker Chartered  Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. started making microprocessor  chips for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. this month and will begin  shipments as early as July, an industry source told Reuters.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices' move to cut overhead costs by outsourcing its chip manufacturing business may backfire in the long run, according to several analysts who have downgraded the company's stock. AMD is struggling it keep its head above water after posting losses of $611 million and $574 million for its past two quarters. The company has also drawn criticism for its manufacturing, with recent reports that it will delay the full-volume launch of the "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip from July to October. That would hobble AMD in its effort to compete with surging rival Intel. Although AMD's Opteron has won over many users of Intel's Xeon server chips since its launch in 2003, that trend is now in a sharp reversal, according to a June 13 report from Jon Peddie Research. In the market for workstation processors, AMD had pushed Intel's share down to 87.6 percent in the first quarter of 2006, but Intel has rebounded since then, reaching 92 percent share in the first quarter of 2007. The building pressure recently prompted some analysts to predict that AMD might stop manufacturing any chips at all and convert to a fully outsourced business model as soon as 2008. AMD said that rumor had come from a "speculative" Goldman Sachs report, but confirmed that the company is trying to focus its efforts on developing chips instead of manufacturing them, according to AMD spokesman Drew Prarie. AMD currently has a deal giving it access to IBM's chip fabrication plant in East Fishkill, New York. Under that arrangement, AMD can perform much of its research and development without having to incur the cost of owning its own manufacturing plant, he said. "We're looking to find ways to extend that model beyond research and development to the full range of the manufacturing supply chain," Prarie said Monday. "That could run the range from increasing the amount of processors we send out for chartered manufacturing, and could also include things like establishing partnerships on the manufacturing side." AMD has already taken some steps in this direction. In 2006, AMD announced a plan to give Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing a heavier load, asking the firm to begin making the new 65-nanometer scale Athlon chips and other processors. And in May, AMD announced that it hadÂ awarded the job of manufacturing its newest graphics chips to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Now the company may be preparing to expand that model, according to a June 17 report from Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung. AMD is on the verge of making a "transformational move" such as outsourcing a larger share of low-end processors to TSMC, selling a share of the manufacturing capacity in its Fab 30 chip-making plant in Dresden, Germany, or even selling a share in its planned $3.2 billion chip plant in Saratoga County, New York, Yeung wrote. Despite AMD's insistence that such an arrangement would simply allow it to stay in the chip business while cutting costs, the uncertainty makes Wall Street analysts nervous. The Citigroup report lowered its estimate of AMD's future revenue from $1.3 billion to $1.1 billion for the second quarter, and from $5.8 billion to $5.6 billion for the full year of 2007. Those figures would represent a flat performance compared to AMD's performance last year, with $1.22 billion of revenue in the second quarter of 2006 and $5.6 billion for the full year. "We are again lowering AMD estimates, this time for 2Q07 (we had previously lowered 2H07), reflecting our field checks suggesting current conditions are weak," Yeung wrote. While Citigroup recognizes that AMD could be moving away from its own manufacturing and that could help the company cut costs, "we remain on hold for the shares given near-term weakness," he wrote. In contrast, Yeung said Intel would continue to enjoy a competitive advantage thanks to theÂ potential delay of AMD's Barcelona chips, the rising popularity of Intel's new Santa Rosa notebook platform, and the continued sales of Core-family chips for desktop PCs.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) said Friday it wouldÂ begin shipping its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processorÂ in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October. Although AMD has already lined up hardware partners like Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use the chip in high-end servers, some analysts had predicted that a delayed release could cause AMD toÂ lose business to Intel. However, AMD insists it is on schedule to produce both standard and low-wattage SE (special edition) versions of Barcelona, in a range of frequencies up to 2.0GHz. The new Barcelona chips will generate the same amount of heat as current Opteron chips, but improve computing performance by 70 percent for database applications or 40 percent for floating point jobs, Allen said. Future versions of both types will run at even higher speeds, allowing customers to further improve their energy efficiency, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division. Intel competes for those same customers today with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processorsÂ launched last year, and plans to up the ante in the fourth quarter of 2007 with quad-core "Harpertown" server chip using smaller, 45-nanometer scale components. AMD will begin shipping Barcelona chips for sale in August, and expects server vendors to ship commercial products using the chip by September. AMD hopes those new servers are popular enough to help reverse a slide in market share and revenue in recent months. The company has posted losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two quarters as it struggles to survive aÂ price war with Intel. Â
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The high-speed broadband communications, storage, and MIPS processor chip maker said revenues are now expected to be between $71 million and $73 million.
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I guess this news will have to hold us over until the individual companies make their announcements. AMD today announced PCI Express support from leading chipset manufacturers, offering performance-hungry
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Panel trying to decide whether to bring formal antitrust charges against the chipmaker, according to a source.
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Blog: AMD announces its quad core server chips will ship in August
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AMD and IBM are extending a deal which has seen them co-operating on chip-making technology since 2002. The deal was due to end next year it will now run until December 2008.
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The Intel rival known for its Athlon PC and Opteron server processors announced on Tuesday plans to tap Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, a contract manufacturer, for extra chip-production capacity.
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IBM , Singapore's Chartered  Semiconductor  and Samsung Electronics   will join forces to develop and manufacture chips using an  advanced processing technology, the companies said on  Wednesday.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) said Friday it would begin shipping its &quot;Barcelona&quot; quad-core Opteron processor in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October.
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Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., a leading Chinese computer chip maker, plans to begin supplying chips using more advanced technology to major clients such as Texas Instruments Inc. beginning next year, the companies said Friday.
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As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won&#39;t be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?Many of AMD&#39;s current troubles are tied to Barcelona, the first version of its Quad-Core Opteron processor.&#160;Repeated delays of this chip weakened AMD&#39;s finances and undermined confidence in the company&#39;s ability to deliver new products as promised. Rebuilding that lost confidence among corporate users and the financial community won&#39;t be easy and the company can ill afford further missteps.Over the next six months, there are several milestones that AMD must hit in order to get back on track. The first, and arguably most important, involves volume shipments of Barcelona, scheduled to happen during the first quarter. AMD desperately needs this chip to shore up flagging revenue from its commercial business and to take back ground lost recently to Intel in the server market.With a bug that was recently discovered in Barcelona fixed, AMD expects the latest version of the chip to start coming out of its manufacturing plants in January. Barcelona shipments are expected to rise throughout the first quarter, reaching &quot;full volumes&quot; and widespread availability of servers based on the chip during the second quarter, according to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.Another early milestone to look out for involves Shanghai, the second version of the Quad-Core Opteron chip that&#39;s set for volume production during the second half of 2008. AMD will produce Shanghai with a 45-nanometer manufacturing process that is one generation ahead of the 65-nanometer process used to make Barcelona.The numbers used to describe chip manufacturing processes refer to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip. The smaller these features can be made, the better. Making these features smaller gives chip makers the ability to shrink the overall size of a chip, thereby reducing unit manufacturing costs, or to add new features. Chips made using a more advanced process may also consume less power and run faster than other versions. But semiconductor production is as much art as it is science, and moving to a more advanced process is fraught with risks.In the case of Shanghai, AMD will take advantage of the 45-nanometer process to triple the size of the Level 3 (L3) cache, from 2M bytes in Barcelona to 6M bytes. The L3 cache is a shared pool of memory that can be accessed by all four cores on the chip. Each core has 512K bytes of Level 2 (L2) cache. When data is moved out of the L2 cache, it moves into the L3 cache instead of main memory, meaning that the core can access this information more quickly than would otherwise be possible.Like AMD&#39;s existing server lineup, Barcelona and Shanghai also include an on-chip memory controller that further helps to increase performance.The memory structure used in the Quad-Core Opteron is different from Intel&#39;s server chips, which do not use an L3 cache and do not have an on-chip memory controller. Instead, Intel&#39;s quad-core Xeon 7300 server chips have 8M bytes of shared L2 cache. Since Intel processors actually pack two dual-core chips inside a single package, the L2 cache is divided into two parts, with 4M bytes on each silicon chip. Intel&#39;s processors do not use an on-chip memory controller.Boosting the Quad-Core Opteron&#39;s L3 cache with Shanghai should give AMD&#39;s quad-core chips the opportunity to stretch their legs, but the company has to make them first. The first working samples of Shanghai are due out of AMD&#39;s factory in Dresden, Germany, in January, according to recent remarks by Mario Rivas, executive vice president of AMD&#39;s Computing Products Group. If these samples arrive late or suffer from unexpected technical problems, this could delay volume production of Shanghai to late 2008 or even early 2009. Conversely, working samples that arrive on schedule and meet or exceed expectations would give AMD an added boost.Besides the server segment, there are a couple of key product milestones on AMD&#39;s roadmap for desktop and mobile processors that bear watching as well.For example, the company plans a first-quarter rollout of Perseus, a package of chips aimed at PCs for the corporate market and centered on a quad-core or triple-core processor and an RS780 or SB700 chipset. A dual-core version will also be rolled out. During the second quarter, AMD plans to roll out Puma, a chip package designed for notebooks. Puma is based on a new processor, called Griffin, expected to offer better performance and power efficiency than AMD&#39;s existing line of mobile processors.AMD plans to offer additional details of its plans and upcoming products at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held in Las Vegas during January, Hughes said.
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The chipmaker appears to have met its most recent deadline for production of the smaller-featured chips.
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The chip maker now expects revenue of between $8.3 billion and $8.6 billion due to lower-than-expected worldwide demand for its processors as well as "customer reductions in component inventory levels."
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The chip is expected to be unveiled Tuesday, in time to bump up the performance of game desktops before the holidays.
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Advanced Micro Devices says its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processor will ship in August, as planned.