Posted on 12/28/2004 10:52:31 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
CHANDLER, Ariz. (Reuters) - From a wind-swept industrial site in the Sonoran Desert, Intel Corp. (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , appears to be gearing up for battle.
Construction crews hammer away at an unprecedented $2 billion upgrade to one of Intel's two Arizona factories, preparing the world's largest chip maker to safeguard its lead in manufacturing from resurgent rivals and to put recent costly missteps behind it.
The stakes are high: If Intel can pull off its complex renovation of the 8-year-old Fab 12 plant, it could pioneer a much cheaper alternative to building chip fabrication facilities from scratch.
For Intel's top manufacturing executive, Robert Baker, the challenge is also to show that a technology powerhouse with a manufacturing staff of 45,000 -- six times the entire payroll of rival AMD -- can be a nimble innovator.
"Part of what I do is put the emphasis on how fast we respond," Baker, 49, said in a recent interview.
Intel needs to move faster than ever in its 36-year history after a series of product blunders in 2004, including a recall of defective desktop computer chips.
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , Intel's smaller rival that made its name by making bargain-basement Intel knockoffs, has been gaining in consumer niches like chips for PC gaming and computer servers. And with help from partner IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , AMD has honed its manufacturing, especially in factory automation.
"AMD is the perceived leader on the automation side, not Intel," said Risto Puhakka, vice president of industry forecaster VLSI Research.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
BTW, Firefox's "View selection source" is awesome for cutting and pasting articles with everything, including links and paragraph breaks, intact.
I'm sitting in my office at Intel reading this
Good for Intel. They support alot of mid to high salary jobs. Must be the Bush economy that is allowing such robust business investment. On second thought, it was probably Algore's browbeating of the economy that led business leaders to realize what a boon we are in. Kinda like Gore's "global warming" speech during the last Noreaster.
NOW you tell me...
So Bush's tax cuts have helped Intel keep (and expand) production in the US, as opposed to going overseas? Damn, Kerry, Bush is accomplishing what YOU promised (keeping jobs here) AND what he promised (economic growth).
Good news for us all. And good to know we'll still be buying American chips. =)
So what gives with 64 bit chips?
And the best US Made chips are Tim's Cascade Crunch (Jalapeno flavored). Ooops, wrong type of chip...
Sounds good. I'll have some with chipotle sauce.
Mmm, those do sound good. Where do you get 'em?
Made in Auburn Washington, only available in the western states, I believe. They'll be nationwide in a few years.
Should I have before ??? Actually when we started talking some years ago I was at Motorola
Don't know ...I'm doing Optic chips
I'm in Arizona; is that Western enough?
Two important ones are: They they can hold entire high-precision floating point numbers for calculations at once, rather than having to split them up and do more steps to achieve the same result. And they can directly access more than 4GB of memory.
AMD's implementation gives it even more differentiation from Intel in that you get to have double the number of registers (extremely fast memory locations on the chip) to work with. Unfortunately, you'll need Windows 64-bit to finally get released if you want to take advantage of any of this (or use the currently available 64-bit Linux).
Apple with their IBM PPC 970 has a chip designed from the beginning to work seamlessly with both 32- and 64-bit software (64-bit isn't an added extended mode as with AMD), and while the current Mac OS has some performance-sensitive libraries ported to 64-bit, all the important parts will be ported to 64-bit by this spring.
Of course, all of the above depends on you having 64-bit software to run.
Do you need 64-bit? The bigger and more registers will definitely help you run CAD, video and 3D rendering faster or to a higher precision. The extra memory will help the larger jobs of the prior three types run much faster, and also help immensely with large databases. Games for the PC also get a boost by having more registers.
don't bother spending extra for a 64-bit chip if you're just running Office and browsing. However, right now the Athlon 64 chips are pretty cheap so they would be a good bet, especially since they contain other optimizations that make them faster than similarly-clocked 32-bit AMD chips.
Thanks...now I'm hungry again!
A lot ... if not most chips have performance degragation over temp. We actually test for this. I don't think that the chip was "designed" to slow down if heated up ... it's just the nature of the beast.
I'm using a 64 bit Itanium running Linux for my DFT sims. The design is too big for the 32 bit machine
Uhhh I have been using AMD for years now, not because they are a Bargain-basement knockoff, but because they are FASTER!
I like my Athalon's too!
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