AMD and Micron Rumors

[GT98]

I don't know if you heard about this yet but theres been rumors as of late that AMD might be bought by Micron. I heard that AMD is closing two Fabs in Texas (their oldest ones) and laying off 2000 workers and that also Gateway isn't going to use AMD chips any more since they quoted that Intel will meet their needs for budget systems.

how does the future look for AMD then with the current events? Would a buy out by Micron make things better or worse for them? If Micron did buy them, well they would have the best memory products and one of the (if not the) Best CPU in the world...I guess that would be a good thing. Anyone else care to comment?

Scott

[Nuno]

It might as well be rumors. I don´t know why everybody is concerned about AMD financial situation. They had losses for years and years in a row, and now they sell every cpu they can manufacture and they actually have profits, people are concerned about it going bankrupcy?

Gateway decision is merely echonomical. Only one supplier, exclusive contract, cpu´s for less $$$, less stocks, less assembly lines... Intel now has covered they low-mid range market with their 845 boards. Of course, a mighty yet cheap P4 1500+i845+sdram will perform worse than a PIII933, but who cares about it when you can say you have a 1.5 GIGAhertz cpu?

[omegaRED]

So really now, whats the deal with the P4? It`s amazingly cheap ... TOO cheap ...

[Wombat]

I think AMD is in better shape than Micron.

And the two fabs they closed are old, old, 6", .6u fabs. I can't believe they used them this long, that they have products that still sell in that process.
The layoffs weren't overnight. They won't complete until June, and a lot of it is just these fabs. Hell, companies have been laying off lately because it's trendy.

And Gateway? Yeah, AMD losing business kinda sucks, but I bet intel gave Gateway a <I>really</I> good deal to do it. Doesn't matter too much to me though. IMHO Gateway hasn't made a good decision in years. They used to be a good computer to buy, but that hasn't been true for some time.

[Nuno]

Via C3 is amazingly cheap too.

Intel i845 smells awfully like the cacheless Celeron. Even worse, because these actually performed quite well on games/fpu, who cared about integer these days, you didn´t need more than a p166 to run word97.

It would be a smart move if it had DDR support - it would make a good mid-range platform. Now when i845+SDRAM+PIV 2 Ghz takes a beat from a AthlonMP 1.2 on a KT266, It surely looks like intel is deceiving their costumers.

I really don´t know what´s up with Intel these days. When they felt threatned by the K6-2, they released the Celeron-A, one of the best price/performance cpu´s ever made.

[rylan]

Well, Intel isn't allowed to make a DDR chipset under their licensing contract with Rambus for another year. Remember when Intel got in bed with rambus about 1.5 years ago? Well, they were pushing the crap so hard that thery agreed not to user DDR at all for several years.. hence the crappy 845 chipset that uses old PC133 SDRAM.
While Intel can't make a DDR chipset, Via can, and they are.

And by the way.. Intel is basically decieving their customers.. but you have to remember who you are dealing with.. most people don't have a clue how fast stuff really is.. they see 2GHz and think "hey, its gotta be faster than that 1.4GHz Athlon because the Intel chip has a bigger number". The average consumer is a retard when it comes to stuf flike this, and thats where Intel has an advantage. People will buy up their crappy 845 chipset with 1.8GHz Pee4s because they're cheap, and they won't know they're getting a syustem that performs slower than a 1GHz Athlon rig.

Anyway, AMD should be fine.. those FABs are old technology, actually .7micron etching, used for legacy contract products and small scale chips. They weren't making any money on those fabs anyway, and were planning to phase them out.. they just accelerated the process some to save some money sooner.