It's good news for both AMD and Intel, only time will tell if it's good for the consumer. This money gives AMD ~18-24 months to become competitive. If they haven't done it by then then I can't see them doing it- at least as an indepedant company. They have got a cash injection from the sale of their fabs, and now this $1.25bn. 24 months from now they should have release of everything that they have spent the last few years working on: the replacement to Phenom, Fusion, their new mobile chips and ultra mobile- possible for phones etc. Not all of these need to be run-away success stories, but at least 1 of them needs to a cash cow. Unless they start making serious cash they just won't be able to fund the R&D that is needed to compete with Intel/ARM clients. A weak AMD is much worse than no AMD as if AMD were forced out of the market, or bought out, then someone with the financial muscle, like the juggernaut that is Samsung, could step in and take their place.
That could be right if the guys who own half of AMD and Glofo didn't have more money than god.
put it this way, AMD's owners have more money in their wallets to spend on frivilous crap than Intel, IBM, Apple and a bunch of other companies have together in their banks.
AMD are in no financial trouble, right now AMD's chips make a HUGE profit. THe only reason AMD isn't profitable all in, is because it quite literally costs 3-4billion to retool for a new process and another couple billion in R&D support in all the other companies they give money to invest in the next tech. This is spread out amongst 5-6 fabs at Intel, who sell more chips per years, while AMD need to Spend the EXACT SAME AMOUNT on R&D as INtel, but that gets spread across a much smaller amount of fabs and chips being made.
So basically say both companies spend 6billion to get from 65 to 45nm, Intel cover this cost amongst 5 fabs that produce 400million chips, AMD have the same cost but only run 2 fabs and sell 100million chips.
Chip production NOW is profitable, the reason to go fabless is to have the secondary company be able to get new clients, more fabs, and spread the R&D cost amongst lots more companies and far more chips sold in total. This will basically instantly push AMD into profitability. Remember right now they've already paid for all the R&D, they've paid most of the costs of R&D towards 32nm for GloFo as its been being researched for years. Its really the next few years all those costs shift to GloFo, and AMD's expenditure drops by an amount in the range of 4-6billion every two years. If AMD had spent 4-6 billion less every 2 years for the past decade, they'd be ridiculously rich with 30billion in the bank rather than only around 4 billion in debt. When you consider the limitations of only running two fabs(it takes much longer to switch over to a new process when you can't test it on one fab while ramping production on the other fabs to make up for the loss, intel can stick a new process in one fab at a time straight away, AMD have to wait months for yields to be high enough to make the switch and pay a LOT to switch the fabs over as quickly as possible), the fact they are only around 4billion in debt, when they are spending 5-6billion every two years just on R&D and buying equipment for new processes, thats why 4billion is actually a VERY small number for a company spending quite a lot more than that all told every couple of years.
THe new fab in New York state that GloFO are footing the bill for is costing around 7billion, only about 1.5-2billion is construction the rest is the equipment, thats just how much it costs, with a further few billion every drop to a new smaller process. Even with GloFo footing the bill for the final equipment AMD themselves over the past years will have sunk billions in the developement of that equipment, and they've already spent a lot on 22nm aswell and are investing in research for 16/11nm.
But this is the thing, they make a lot of money on their cpu's, and sell a lot, without a hugely competitive top end chip. The fact is though, their tri core's are priced against Intel dual cores, their low end quad cores are priced against Intel quad cores, for 90% of home users AMD offers what performance they NEED for less than Intel. Intel offer the performance 5% of the population wants, but charge more for it. You make money both ways.
WIth Bulldozer they have a superb chip going exactly the way they need to. I'd suggest Intel will be moving away from overly large FPU units within their CPU cores as they bring GPU's capable of doing FPU better and with lower power in their future CPU's too.
Basically CPU's always excelled at interger calc, gpu's are fpu monsters that no cpu can come close to keeping up with and are only getting better. Once they are both on die it won't be long before FPU is almost exclusively in the gpu section of a cpu. Bulldozer is a half step there and has insane interger power.
ANyway all that aside, one of the reasons AMD are doing so well is their platform of gpu/cpu/mobo is so powerful for an incredibly competitive price, that will continue and Larabee probably isn't that close to competing at any level for now in performance. It will probably be 2-3 generations before Intel are really up to date and pushing ATI at the low mid and high ends of discrete gpu's, till then AMD are selling good numbers to OEM's and thats all that matters.
