GloFo in trouble? pushing early retirement

[Bit_Guardian]

5 minutes ago, zMeul said:

no one if forcing anyone - AMD made a choice to stick with GloFo

IBM are the ones with a contract to source from Glofo through 2025 (if I recall)

See Nephilim2's response. Abu Dhabi, having a significant voting share in both companies, likely pressures them to work well together to preserve both investments.

[Trixanity]

13 hours ago, zMeul said:

no one if forcing anyone - AMD made a choice to stick with GloFo

IBM are the ones with a contract to source from Glofo through 2025 (if I recall)

Yeah that's not entirely true.

Glofo has AMD by the balls. They have wafer agreements; agreements that favors Glofo entirely.

 

These deals were made when AMD spun off the company. No one would have given AMD money if they weren't ensured customers so AMD have their hands bound til 2024.

 

So AMD is forced to buy a minimum amount of wafers and pay a fine if they don't do that.

 

In their recent amendment AMD has to pay a $100mil fine for changing the rules so they can get chips made at other fabs if AMD isn't satisfied with Glofo. That's on top of the aforementioned fine for not meeting the wafer count they agreed on.

 

In addition AMD had to give the option of buying an even bigger stake in AMD therefore gaining more influence over the company and more money if AMD is successful.

The Abu Dhabi company already owns a decent chunk of AMD. So they have a lot of say in both Glofo and AMD plus they profit from aligning their future together and maintaining a symbiotic relationship even though it's ultimately detrimental to AMD.

[Tomsen]

16 hours ago, nephilim2 said:

shrugs*

 

Also, there are still very significant performance differences elsewhere even when you normalize the clocks.

You are arguing to no end. Sandy bridge was able to archive very high clocks that we are only able to compare with the latest few generations. Outside of edge-cases the performance differences isn't that great. 

[RagnarokDel]

On 12/04/2017 at 4:41 AM, zMeul said:

if GloGo goes bust, it's going to be really bad for AMD

They could use any number of 14nm fabs. If anything it might be beneficial for AMD as they wouldnt be forced to order exclusively from Global Foundry. They could use Samsung's or TSMC but pushing people to early retirement doesnt have to be bad. With the increase in automation, it can absolutely make sense that they're just planning to remove human workers to replace them with robots.