Intel inaugurates a new 45nm factory Chipsets: AMD wagers on integration CPU Q1 2008 market shares and sales

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Intel inaugurates a new 45nm factory   Posted on 02/07/2008 at 21:46 by Nicolas - source: divers

	Yesterday, the CPU giant inaugurated a new factory planned for 45nm in Israel, a country where it has been for more than 30 years now. The facility may require 1,900 employees. It is the third of its type and should enable the company to considerably improve its capacity as the value of production should be around $10 million daily. However, it should be added that the site cost them roughly $3.5 billion. Installed next to the FAB 18, which was handed over to Numonyx (the Flash subsidiary in which STM and Francisco Partners are also stockholders), it will replace the Jerusalem based FAB 8 and the first to be built outside of the U.S. Since then, the Santa Clara firm seems to have learned how to take advantage of its proximity to the Middle East because its on-site teams were able to develop CPUs such as the Pentium M or Nehalem.

Chipsets: AMD wagers on integration   Posted on 02/07/2008 at 21:20 by Nicolas

	CHW has put several slides of AMD’s chipset roadmap online. While there has been room for improvement for ATI/AMD’s Southbridge for some time now, we can note significant changes are planned. Amongst the most interesting, there is C6 and Fusion (for Power Management) support, the integration of a Gigabit MAC controller and clock generator, the likely transition to SATA 6Gb/s, AHCI 1.2 support, as well as the addition of an embedded controller with DASH support. These characteristics should enable lowering the cost of Business Class platforms as they impose these types of functions. In terms of USB, while the number of ports increases, there is not yet USB 3.0. Finally, it seems that the introduction of the Socket AM3, which will take the 45nm Phenom Deneb and enable them to function with DDR3, is planned for the first quarter of 2009. We can only hope the price of this memory continues to decrease until then as it should also be found in the Value segment (entry level).

CPU Q1 2008 market shares and sales   Posted on 02/07/2008 at 18:10 by Nicolas - source: iSuppli

	iSuppli, the research firm specialized in financial information, has just published its estimates for market shares in the first quarter of 2008. ‘’Others’’ represents VIA and manufacturers of RISC processors and "general-purpose" type CPUs. While Intel comes close to 80%, we can nevertheless see that AMD is regaining strength. On the other hand, when compared to last quarter the situation is less optimistic for the Sunnyvale firm although we should keep in mind that the Phenom B3 was only announced in the last days of the first quarter. Overall, the first three months of the year were better than expected with the delivery of 69.9 million CPUs, or an increase of 12.1% compared to the same quarter in 2007. However, given that sales of laptop PC processors increased 30% in the same period, this means that the increase on the desktop was practically nil. More good news for these companies is that average sales prices didn’t decrease compared to the previous quarter, a sign that the price war is over and maybe that there is a lack of competition on the mid-high end.