AMD-UMC deal slimmed down by IBM agreement

THE DEAL AMD and IBM announced yesterday is just a share-technology kind of thing, the firm told us today, and will have no effect on its plans to build a fab with United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC).

Richard Baker, European marketing director at AMD, confirmed that the deal with IBM doesn't have a foundry component.

The existing foundry deal with IBM has never, to the best of his knowledge, been made use of, he also said.

But the deal with UMC has been thrown into doubt, according to this story on EB News, which said today that the two sides are winding up their cooperation in an amicable manner.

Baker confirmed that the foundry agreement continues, the joint venture agreement continues, but the development agreement on technology is being wound up, amicably.

An IBM Microelectronics representative said today: "We had what was in effect a 'foundry agreement' with AMD, who were trying to crank up their x86 challenge to Intel and having trouble with what must have been .25 micron and/or transfer to .18 'copper' -- we were the only people doing so at the time. I'm not sure how long that lasted, but it was not a 'next generation development' agreement, which this is."

But these comments have sparked off memories of other great foundry agreements of our time.

IBM and Cyrix had a deal where the latter designed 686 chips and Big Blue made them. Each was entitled to a half share of the processors that were made, and packaged and sold them separately. In those days, us hacks were faced with the ludicrous situation where IBM was telling us its chips were better than the Cyrix chips - even though the processors were entirely the same apart from the name on the top of the package. Worse, for Cyrix, IBM undercut its prices on these parts...

Then, too, there is the famous deal with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that AMD had, in which the former would make K6 chips for the latter. Bob Palmer was CEO of DEC then. Where is he now? Oh yeah, he's an AMD director...

These chips were made at the DEC South Queensferry fab, which was part financed by the UK government, and opened to mighty fanfare by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. This fab, to the best of our knowledge, is still well and truly shuttered. There was even a special motorway spur built to go to the fab - now not much used except by the security guards, we suspect.

And of course there was the famous IBM-Intel technology agreement. Based in Boca Raton, we were treated to a trip round this facility and caused a bit of a scare because the IBM suit in charge of the facility hadn't realised that just behind him was a huge diagram of the PCI technology his firm and Chipzilla were then developing. The engineers used Sun workstations to design the systems - but somewhat strangely, the same year, an Intel executive told us that one of Chipzilla's first targets was to totally destroy the market for Sun workstations by undercutting them on price and performance with its own chips.

Sometimes it seems that nothing really changes in the chip industry... the headlines are similar, the battles are practically identical, and it's only the frequencies we face in the megahurts madness that's really different. µ