CES 2010 : Qualcomm To Use Former AMD Foundries To Produce Snapdragon Chips

It may be the biggest partnership win outside of AMD that Global Foundries -- the new company managing AMD's former fabrication facilities -- may ever have, or need to have, and it will be the talk of CES in just a few hours: Qualcomm has signed an agreement to be Global Foundries next big customer, with plans to produce smartphone and smartbook components at Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany this year.

Fab 1 is AMD's former Fab 36 -- the main production facility for AMD's 45 nm quad-core CPUs, which Global Foundries produces for AMD today. It's one of the crown jewel facilities for fabricating multicore chips anywhere in the world, now being fitted for the high-k-plus-metal-gate process developed with IBM.

With Global Foundries producing Snapdragon chips for Qualcomm -- as its CEO, Dr. Paul Jacobs, will likely make official during a CES keynote later this afternoon -- Qualcomm may not just go toe-to-toe against Intel's Atom both qualitatively and quantitatively, but may even have a leg up.

Snapdragon is the chip platform behind Google's and HTC's Nexus One phone, announced Tuesday; and Acer's A1 Liquid, which runs Android 1.6 "Donut" today, but which many see as capable of Android 2.1 "Eclair" before very long. Today, it's a single-core 1 GHz processor produced by ARM, the leading producer of embedded processors and the champion of the "smartbook" concept.