Where I think AMD really fell behind was they were not able to afford the kind of R&D on the manufacturing side that Intel does for each new process. AMD basically gave up and is now in the same boat as the rest of the "fabless" companies being 100% dependent on what TSMC or Global Foundries can produce. This is always going to put you at a competitive disadvantage at the very high end. While intel is working on pushing down to 22nm FINFET for the "old" architecture people in the design group are without a doubt working on 16nm and getting sample silicon at this node so they can tune their designs for what the transistors will really look like. When you go fabless you get to figure this out with poor yields while in "manufacturing" at the foundry. Maybe at 130 -65nm this wasn't such a big deal but when you need to make your design work with double or tripple patterned 193nm immersion lithography just figuring out some design rules is no simple task.

Also does anyone know if there is more than 1 vendor in the world that can make fully depleted SOI of the quality needed for 32nm - 28nm on a 300mm wafer? Last I knew this was a major reason behind Intel pushing FINFET instead of the fully depleted SOI.

This is a real disadvantage from an IC designer standpoint, I would expect that this is not as much of restriction as they are already contained by in the extreme limits imposed on the design by double (possibly triple in this case) patterning to get down to 22nm.

I did see a TSMC presentation earlier this spring at SPIE showing scaling down to the 1xnm node where they actually had little "pipes" of channel where the gate wrapped all the way around (Think of the gate line in a FINFET going through the "fins", in this the FINs became the gates). In this kind of process, designer would be allowed to modify W again on the transistor by making the pipes larger or having two or three of them as part of your transistor with minimal interconnect.

Props to whoever used the Arrested Development house image on their reviews, its what came up when I clicked it.

If you really care about what music you listen too while you eat your pizza, why wouldn't you just take it back to your place and eat it there?

I log into ones of these everyday for work. Still running OpenVMS.

I also need to log into some Sparc 5 that are running older litho tools in the factory.

I have a NY Times account and accually read the whole atricle.

There is no data in the article to support the summary, and it is mostly a fluffy Biographical piece about a great particle physicist who isn't 100% convinced that global warming will be that bad that hard to fix.

This whole discussion has been blown way out of proportion.

Here is one more, I did several boards with them when I was in college, their customer service was very helpful with my first board.

http://www.4pcb.com/

I was wondering the same thing, VMS is great. Its still heavly used in Manufacturing and Military systems. The only reason we have any PCs inside of our factory is to function as terminals.