The Inquirer reports that AMD fabs can and will make ATI GPUs.
Well, they needed to do something with Fab 30!
One little-known fact about Fab 30 was that when the various German governments agreed to subsidize its construction, AMD had to guarantee the jobs there through 2008, so they couldn’t just mothball the place.
So AMD had to keep it open doing something, and in all honesty, selling 90nm CPUs in late 2007 and into 2008 just wasn’t going to be a very good idea while Fab 30 was being upgraded. Making GPUs at 90nm (or perhaps 30 could get tweaked down to 80nm) would make more sense.
More importantly, in the long run, given the reality that GPU fabrication processes trail CPU fabrication; it gives AMD something better to do with fabs once they’ve passed their CPU prime, and likely will give GPUs made that way a cost advantage over nVidia’s.
Now if AMD could only find money to pay for all these new fabs and conversions . . . .
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