IBM leads semiconductor plot against Intel

WE DON'T KNOW what IBM has got against Intel - heck, they used to be best buddies, and even shared a building known as the Robert Noyce Center in Florida. It was there where we were bundled out of the room just before we could take a snap of the upcoming PCI standard they both developed.

Anyway, the fact is that relationship soured in a long "dark night of the soul", with IBM teaming up with Apple and Motorola and even with the late lamented Cyrix. The irony in that relationship was that it had a joint venture to fab and package these X86 compatible chips, yet Big Blue was strangely reluctant to sell machines using them.

And so we wind forward to today. Whispers reach us that the relationship IBM has with AMD is far from just East Fishkill doling out tech to Chimpzilla for a rack of florins.

No, word is that IBM is leading troupes of semiconductor manufacturers into an alliance with the aim to stop La Intella being the biggest chip company in the known cosmos.

Other semi firms collaborating together include Cell suspects Toshiba, Sony, Chartered, and a gaggle of others. Here's a f'rinstance. Nikkei says Toshiba, Hitachi and Renesas are collaborating on a joint foundry with state of the art tech in the 65 nanometre and 45 nanometre range, plunging loads of ¥en into a giant fab. Licence holders, according to Koichi Hashimoto, who is in charge of this particular cunning plan, won't be limited to what he describes as the three primary investors.

This is all well and good, you may say - but why isn't IBM using more AMD chips? We refer you back to the Cyrix saga. IBM moves in mysterious ways with different divisions doing their own thang. IBM Microelectronics may have had its travails two or three years ago, but word on the information straße is that those problems are way behind it. It is making dosh, its tech is top notch, and there's a plan to lay Intel out just when the time is ripe to do so. That time may not be as far off as Intel would like. µ