AMD puts Dresden plant in spotlight
Published: 01 Aug 2001 17:04 BST
AMD's Fab 30 plant in Dresden has shipped its ten-millionth Athlon processor, and is set to lead the company's drive to a new manufacturing process early next year.
The world's second-largest processor manufacturer said on Tuesday that it had broken the ten-million mark with its new plant, which began production 13 months ago. AMD Saxony has invested $2.3bn (about £1.6bn) into the region and employs 1700 people in Dresden.
AMD-Dresden spokesman Jens Drews said the plant will begin producing AMD's first processors using the 0.13-micron manufacturing process in the first half of next year, and will also introduce cutting-edge techniques such as silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and AMD's next-generation 64-bit chips, the Hammer line, in the second half.
"Only the high-performance enterprise processors are manufactured here," he said. "In the coming months our customers will see the Thoroughbred (processor) with 0.13-micron, Barton with 0.13-micron and the SOI finishing process, as well as the two members of the Hammer family, Sledgehammer and Clawhammer."
In May of this year AMD shifted the introduction of Hammer up from the first quarter of next year to the second half of 2002. The line will launch with Clawhammer, which will support two-way machines, to be followed later in the year by Sledgehammer, which will support up to eight-way configurations.
As early as September, AMD will introduce a desktop version of Palomino, which has already launched for laptops under the Athlon 4 brand name. The desktop version will stick with the Athlon brand, according to AMD Germany regional head Jochen Polster. "The name is too well-established to simply throw it overboard," he said. "Palomino will be delivered as 'Athlon something'."
While Fab 30 has focussed on high-end processors to date, from September it will also begin manufacturing the cost-oriented Duron MP chip for multi-processing servers, code-named "Morgan". It should launch at around the same time as Palomino and is expected to start off at 900MHz.
ZDNet Germany's Dietmar Mueller contributed to this story
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