How Zen is made

At 0:50 Mark Fuselier states AMD has a partnership with TSMC. Does actually TSMC fabricate any silicon for AMD? I thought they are contracted to use Global Foundries?
 
Huh. From New York to Germany than to Malaysia and China before being shipped across the world again, amazing.
 
Haha nice marketing video. Makes you appreciate the work that goes into these processors. I bet the cost could be cut substantially if there were a facility that could do all the above under one roof.
 
tangoseal said:
Haha nice marketing video. Makes you appreciate the work that goes into these processors. I bet the cost could be cut substantially if there were a facility that could do all the above under one roof.
Click to expand...

What might be the case that the logistics seem over complicated but it might also be that the people working at different locations are highly specified in their field. Local hires outside the USA do not need a green card and so on and so forth ...
 
tangoseal said:
Haha nice marketing video. Makes you appreciate the work that goes into these processors. I bet the cost could be cut substantially if there were a facility that could do all the above under one roof.
Click to expand...

Cool to watch for sure! But in terms of consolidating the manufacturing costs... maybe more dependent on where that roof is located, than just being under one roof? A lot of costs go into the design stages too, which come a couple years before. Manufacturing may actually be the cheaper part of the whole process. They're in it to make money but for a small(er) competitor like AMD (compared to you-know-who) I have to believe they are trying to be as competitive on price as possible.
 
tangoseal said:
Haha nice marketing video. Makes you appreciate the work that goes into these processors. I bet the cost could be cut substantially if there were a facility that could do all the above under one roof.
Click to expand...

Nah, when you ship a few thousand wafers each containing a few hundred chips, the unit cost to ship them around the world is miniscule. If you can get them diced and packaged for $3 a unit instead of $5 a unit, 2 cents shipping doesn't factor in at all. When I worked in the industry we had 3 back end processing places, one in Dresden, one in Porto and one in Souzhou. The shipping cost was insignificant, something like $50 to ship a thousand wafers, which had a few hundred thousand chips in them. You could charter a plane and it'd only be a few cents a chip to fly them wherever (we actually did this once to determine how much radiation damage occurred with long flights).
 
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