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IBM Fishkill Plant with Problems?

Originally posted by tychay

300 mm is the future, and, unlike their competition, IBM has a plant today.
Click to expand...

Actually, Intel has had a 300mm fab up (Fab 11X) in Rio Rancho, New Mexico since November of last year.

They then donated all the old manufacturing stuff (6") to the University of New Mexico.
 
Re: IBM Fishkill Plant with Problems?

Originally posted by Macrumors
...It's unclear if this affects PowerPC 970 production.
Click to expand...

We wouldn't actually be so ignorant as to think that the G5 is the ONLY chip IBM is going to make at their flagship chip plant in Fishkill would we?? ;) Didn't say what KIND of production problems.. Might be contamination.. might be suppliers.. could be lots of things that don't affect G5s in specific.
 
Originally posted by yosoyjay
Actually, Intel has had a 300mm fab up (Fab 11X) in Rio Rancho, New Mexico since November of last year.

They then donated all the old manufacturing stuff (6") to the University of New Mexico.
Click to expand...

Well if you to be technical, Intel has a 300mm (12") fab up in the Pacific Northwest long before New Mexico opened. It is a research fab, I believe which is designing what 11x is supposed to be producing. And 11X launched in October, not November. ;)

I guess I wasn't clear. You are technically right but it doesn't make me wrong.

To bring everyone up to speed: There are three factors that affect chip price:
  1. number of layers: more layers = less yield = more costly
  2. size of the platter: larger platter = more chips per platter = less costly
  3. size of process:smaller process = smaller chip = more yield = less costly.
One issue is that the chips need to be resdesigned to take full advantage of a smaller process and that there are a lot of bugs in the latest technologies. Currently the "latest" is 12" platters (300mm) as opposed to 8" and 90nm process (.09micron) as opposed to 130nm (.13micron). We are comparing IBM Fishkill (which recently stole nVidia's business away from a Taiwanese fab) which is at 130nm (and 90nm) on 12" platters to Motorola (160nm on 8"), AMD (130nm on 8" when they aren't using Fishkill) and Intel (130nm on 8").

As mentioned by the poster, Intel's Fab11X in New Mexico is indeed 130nm on 300mm (12") to transition into 90nm sometime this year. It was commissioned expansion in 2000 for a $2 billion (not including the transition). (I had no idea about the donation to the University of Arizona... it seems a little strange because 11X is an expansion and 11 was too new for 6" and still operational--the combination makes it the largest factory in the world. Are you sure this equipment didn't come from some other fab they closed down?)

Intel's Chandler, Arizona is going to be upgraded also starting this year and will probably open in 2005. There was another 12" fab on the table in Ireland but it was cancelled.

Unlike others, Intel has a lot of fabs so their 8" are still cranking out while their they work out kinks and upgrade others to 12". Read the IBM article again and you see why Intel is so behind schedule on 12"--there is an overcapacity problem--why worry about 12" when your 8" meets demands and bring profit?

However, despite the fact that it has launched last October, 11X is the fab that has been unsuccessful at getting any chips out the door. As evidence:
  1. the glaring lack of news of anything about this fab since it opened
  2. all Pentium 4 chips are currently manufactured on 8" wafers when the intended use of the 11X is to produce the Pentium 4--look it up in any New Mexico press when in October.

Note: I could be wrong here because I found an article saying that the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 is produced at 11X, but it was written by a reporter who knows nothing about the industry and was probably confused--no trade publication has claimed 11X is actually producing anything... you read a lot of carefully worded "will someday produce the Pentium 4" or carefully mention Fab11 and not Fab11X. I am open to anyone proving me wrong here! In my previous post I implied that the Pentium 4 is a simple chip relative to the G5 or Athlon. Yield is already "good enough" out of Intels 8" fabs.

And yet, as I mentioned we have many PC enthusiast sites claiming that Prescott (Intel's 3.2 GHz Pentium "5") to debut this fall at 90nm on 300mm wafers (and no doubt 9+1 layers) on the cheap.

Common sense says, if this is really the case, Intel is seriously behind schedule. Odds are Prescott will debut at 130nm on 8" wafers and later will get shrunk down. Why bother doing anything else? Consider, if you are Intel:
  1. You have an overcapacity problem, you currently make more than enough to match demand.
  2. You have yield issues at your 12" fab.
  3. You have a serious lack of competition: AMD Opteron? That competes with the Pentium 4 XEON at best and has no tier 1 supplier; AMD Athlon 64? Puh-leez, maybe when Microsoft releases an OS for it, but not until then; IBM PPC970/G5? I love Macs but what is their market share again? When was the last Windows for PPC... NT4?
Seems to me like Intel is resting on their laurels as they always have when they've taken won (like just before the Athlon went 1Ghz, like just before DDR overtook RDRAM, like just before Transmeta Crusoe came out).

My original point is that IBM's situation is not unusual or unexpected. Relative to Intel, AMD, and Motorola, Fishkill is ahead of all the others--at worst, their problem is the same problem the rest of the industry faces: underutilization.

Any other conclusion is just a misreading of the reports or the current silicon reality. Any PC enthusiast who tells you differently is a troll.

The suggestion that Motorola is sitting pretty makes me wonder how their supposed upgrade to 12" is going and why the G4 is still at 160nm.

The fact that some of AMD's R&D is in Fishkill and AMD enthusiasts sites hope that IBM buys out AMD out speaks volumes as to their position.

As for Intel? Chipzilla seems to do best when they're back is against the wall, so I expect this situation to change if the 64-bit PC thing (G5 drives sales of Athlon 64) pans out. They didn't get that moniker for being a bunch of pushovers. ;-)
 
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