New IBM Plant Will Mass Produce .1 Micron Chips 378
Ruger writes "AP News is carrying this story about IBM opening a new plant in upstate New York. What's most interesting about the story is that IBM will be producing .1 Micron Chips rather than the usual .25 or .18 produced by Intel and other chip makers, or .13 Micron chips they currently make for their PowerPC chips."
To the naysayers... (Score:2, Insightful)
I wan't to be reading my email and playing nethack on a petaflop machine by the time this decade is out!
What will they make? PowerPC? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article, it sounds like they'll be operating the plan under contract from other companies, so it will most likely be making chipsets for pagers and cell phones.
Of course, the market can be expected to change significantly between now and when the plant is actually ready to build chips.
Itanium wasn't the driver for 300mm (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, it's better to worry about the very high-volume low(er)-cost processor such as the 2.4 and 2.53 and soon to be 2.8 and 3.0 GHz P4s. Intel has been worried about their shrinking margins, and 300mm brings them back up nicely. 300mm was not created as a consequence of Itanium, but rather Itanium was aggressively featured as a consequence of needing to compete and having the luxury of a 300mm wafer to help lower costs. With the enormous L3 memories and the resources that Sun dreams of having, Intel can properly push an Itanium out the door that will have no problem outperforming even the fastest competition. (see this press release [intel.com])
Given the amount of capital and planning involved, 300mm must have been a decision long in process -- and consequently it was completely independent of the recession which gave a much shorter advance warning. However, it was extremely convenient that they had it in the pipeline when the recession hit so they could better tolerate the lower demand, the shrinking number of big players in the PC business and therefore the very high downward pressure on pricing.
Re:IBM vs. M$Intel? (Score:3, Insightful)
The pc isn't the ends to IBM (like it is to Dell/Gateway/etc), but it is a very critical part of the means. And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.