Motorola and TSMC - good news?

[Postal]

http://www.motorola.com/mediacenter/news/detail/1,1958,1604_1252_23,00.html

According to that article, a lot of Motorola's semiconductor manufacturing is going to happen at TSMC. The article refers to Motorola's products as "embedded solutions" (you have to love PR-speak) but, if you read up on Motorola's processor lineup, even the 1 GHz MPC 7455 (also known as the "Apollo" G4 found in PowerMacs) is considered an embedded processor.

This doesn't mean that the G5 is going to be released at MWNY, but TSMC is well-known for their manufacturing capabilities. The nVidia video chips many of us have in our systems are manufactured at TSMC. This means that Apple could potentially have an improved manufacturing process, one which is either more cost-efficient and/or gets newer technologies out the door sooner than if Motorola had to manufacture the CPUs themselves.

 

[Dunepilot]

Cool post

Hi Postal, just wanted to say that this is a useful post; keep em coming.

Such good news on the processor front is rare.

 

[OSeXy!]

Well, even under all the market-speak, that sounds good.
Let's hope it's not just another case of 'too little, too late'.

 

[drastik]

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

More chips, faster would be good. Perhaps the long awaited return to Moore's Law? I want somehting huge at MWNY, I want it all. But, I'm afraid I'm not going to get it.

 

[Postal]

Thanks for the kind words - I was actually just checking the Motorola site based on a post somewhere else (not even sure if it's this forum) and decided to check their news releases on a whim. Sometimes you can find potential news about Apple in unlikely places...

 

[Ouroboros]

There always seems to be the potential for hope somewhere. Let's hope that we aren't all reading between lines that aren't there. In any case, this bodes well for the future because most of the complaints with Motorola has been centered around their tiresome problems with fabbing. They certainly are good at design though.... Again let's just wait and see before people start setting themselves on fire in the streets...