Comment : AMD's Spinning Off Its Foundries.. What If It Fails?

AMD confirmed that it will spin off its chip building operations completely in order to concentrate on chip design. This, as we pointed out earlier today, marks the end of an era where only having a chip factory (or so call a fab) is the hallmark of success.

Intriguingly, W.J. Sanders III, the then-chairman of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices Inc), said once that "real men have fabs". But that expression came back to haunt AMD over the years as prices of fabrication plants soared by roughly one billion dollars each generation, forcing AMD to forge alliances with IBM, Chartered Semiconductor and Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

By deciding today to forgo its foundries, AMD is now becoming an "ordinary" chip manufacturer, part of the so-call gang of fabless x86 companies, almost all of whom, sooner or later die out or become a blip in the global marketplace. They include Cyrix, IDT, Rise Transmeta and a few more.