For Intel 450 mm is ok since they make SOO many chips, consider however that the cost of wafer starts will be much higher. The idea of 300mm and 200mm fabs hanging around is nice, in that there is still room for small innovative players.

Monoculture= recipe for failure.

Putting down chip is one by one process, so adding size isn't like printing press, that does sheets per minute. 450 MM is going to save time on coating of resist & wash out time, yet make no difference in printing of image?. Heres another example of trouble:

According to motherboard vendors,they dont get ideal performance of Marvell 88SE9123 6Gbps SATA controll chip.In comparison with SATA 3Gbps, there is no obvious speed difference.Many vendors decides to give this expensive chip up after reviews and uses Silicon Image SATA 3Gbps SATA chip.

As P55 platform is scheduled to arrive on September,8th-11th,Marvell wont get SATA 6Gbps market share at first time.

According to Intel and AMD latest scheme,Intel has not planned to release southbridge chip supporting SATA 6Gbps;while AMD takes a postive attitude toward it and expects to launch SB800 family in March of next year.
SB800 was testd by Seagate & could produce 590 Mb/s burst speed for sata III. So come on, wheres controller chip that works right? Maybe stuck in 200 MM fab?

vondrashek