Grounds for optimism
Many of the world's top fabless semiconductor providers, as well as parts of AMD, use TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) for their manufacturing. We ask Grose if AMD's arrangements with TSMC will continue after TFC is up and running. "This is a question best directed towards our GPU team," he says.
"What I can tell you is we plan on ramping our 32nm bulk silicon process in Dresden on ATI GPUs. From there, we plan on aggressively competing for this business and would expect TSMC to do the same."
To conclude, we ask what effect this move will have on AMD's move from 65nm to 45nm process parts on the CPU side. "This will have no impact on the 45nm ramp. This has been an incredibly smooth ramp and we are currently in volume production of 45nm CPUs in Dresden."
The picture Grose paints is of a very easy transition from AMD to AMD+TFC, but then we would expect nothing else from the new CEO. For the sake of healthy competition, most of the technology industry will be wishing success to the move too and, provided the obstacles covered in this article are overcome, there are definitely grounds for optimism.
