Who is it targeting?
To find out more about the significance of this announcement from a GF perspective, we spoke to its director of communications, Jon Carvill. "This is a battle of R&D models," he said. "By working within the alliance we can mitigate our costs."
Carvill confirmed that the focus of GF's attention is TSMC, as opposed to Intel, and that a key component to this competition is offering smaller manufacturing processes.
"We see [28nm] as an important cross-over node (along with 32nm) in third-party customer acquisition with tremendous interest from prospective customers," said Carvill. "28nm low power technology in particular is ideally suited to areas like wireless and consumer electronics."
TSMC gets a lot of business from companies that design microprocessors based on original designs licensed from UK company ARM. ARM specializes in small, low power processors designed for use in things like mobile phone handsets and embedded applications, but is starting to also target larger devices, like netbooks.
Right now ARM often validates its designs for TSMC manufacturing processes, as illustrated by the recent announcement concerning TSMC's 40nm process. GF is hoping ARM will validate its own, unique processes and thus entice its ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) to jump ship.