About Contracts and Takeovers
(Translation of the German original in c't by Marcel Sieslack)
"Ship, Ship, Hurray", it says on AMD's website – the Fusion processor "Llano" is now being shipped in large numbers. AMD has renegotiated its contract with Globalfoundries and Texas Instruments acquires – no, not AMD, but – National Semiconductor at a sky-high price.
It won't be long now before it's showtime for the Llano, the Phenom-II-like duo or quad-core processor without L3 cache but with integrated Direct X11 graphics. In early July, or maybe even a bit sooner, first systems are supposed to become available. "Finally", they will say at AMD because the production difficulties, unhappily admitted by Ex-CEO Dirk Meyer during last year's autumn, have significantly delayed this "hurray". Unfortunately, as is now known, Meyer had also signed an unfavorable contract with Globalfoundries, because of which AMD had to pay agreed-upon fixed prices to Globalfoundries in spite of the lack of good, working chips. This is supposed to change, at least for chips produced in 32-nm technology this year. According to the freshly signed Wafer Supply Agreement, AMD will continue to pay fixed quarterly prices for 45-nm but not so for 32-nm dies. With retroactive effect to the first quarter, AMD will only pay for the good 32-nm dies. If AMD is satisfied with this year's results and if Globalfoundries delivers enough good chips, the contract stipulates that AMD will make fixed quarterly payments again afterwards. The partners predict a trade volume of 1.1 to 1.5 billion dollars for 2011 and 1.5 to 1.9 billion for 2012. In the future, Globalfoundries shall also be more strongly considered regarding GPUs and chipsets. At the same time – but, according to AMD, unrelated to the contract – AMD's equity interest in Globalfoundries has been re-evaluated, resulting in a non-cash gain of about 492 million for AMD.
Globalfoundries, it's said, could agree upon the new deal without hesitation. Supposedly, the yield rate has meanwhile reached such a high level that – depending on the details of the contract – the new agreement might even result in higher profits than the old one would have. Also, this way Globalfoundries indicates to all other potential customers that the 32-nm SOI manufacturing process really is technically mature now.
In Singapore, where the processors receive their housing, the shipping of the Llano is celebrated.
Leaked
AMD hopes the same for the Bulldozer, which is manufactured in that selfsame process and the prototypes of which AMD is now shipping to everyone. A few benchmark results have already turned up – not on Wikileaks, but on OpenBenchmarking.org. Just a quick glance at the stream-benchmark results, however, suffices to know that they can't be worth much: 12 GB/s for a system with two Interlagos chips (32 integer cores, 1.8 GHz). Current Opterons can do so asleep. Obviously, the Interlagos prototype only runs at a fraction of its memory performance – so it's not really worth the while to consider those benchmark results. At least, they show that the Bulldozer does in deed run and that it is no ghost chip.
At Intel, some employee had apparently read about Intel's "ghost chips" in the last Processor Whispers and agreed that they should take form quickly. And so, he or she went ahead and released the – comparatively high – price of 75 U.S. dollars for the long overdue Oak-Trail processor with the official name Atom Z670 (512 KB cache, 1 core, 2 threads, 1.5 GHz, 45 nm). That was a bit hasty, though, as the Atom for tablets is actually not supposed to be officially released before the IDF kicks off in Peking in mid-April.
In the new price list with the 10-core Xeons that rolled out on the 5th of April, you'll now also find the single-processor Xeons E3-xxxx, which had been delayed because of the chipset bug. It was a short delay of hardly six weeks, however, and so it can't be the reason why the analysts are expecting a profit warning from Intel soon. According to Canaccord Genuity, the PC market's growth rate is 5 percent, which means that – in contrast to the previous year – only the minimum expectations will be met and the same counts for the sales figures predicted for Intel.
And while the New York Stock Exchange NYSE Euronext, where, among others, the AMD stock is traded, and the German stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse are already busy trying hard to come up with a common name – the well-meant suggestions reaching from "DasKapital" to "BagelWurst Exchange" – the takeover might still fail at the very last minute. In order to forestall a German hegemony in the most important American financial market, the much smaller technology stock exchange Nasdaq OMX has quite suddenly teamed up with the commodities exchange ICE and has made a significantly higher offer. Such a surprise is unlikely as far as the merger of two of the companies traded at the NYSE is concerned: With 6.5 billion U.S. dollars, Texas Instruments made a takeover bid for National Semiconductor that the share holders could hardly reject because it is a hefty 78 percent above the current stock value. The scene is now puzzling why TI intents to spend so much money on an ailing analog company. In any case, this way TI could overtake Toshiba and become the number three (behind Samsung Electronics and Intel) of the semiconductor business.
And Something Else
C64 forever: Commodore USA has released a New Commodore 64, based on a mini-ITX board with dual-core Atom D525 and Nvidia Ion chipset, with HD and Blue-ray. And instead of a Datasette with Supertape, you get an up-to-date SATA 2.0 hard drive or an SDD. Apparently, there are still plenty of C64 fans around, for instance, at the German website www.64er-online.de, where you can – legally – find scanned 64 magazines as well as an online emulator in Java that allows you to start programming the old way right away:
10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10
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