AMD breakup; chip production now to be Arab-owned

[ahhaa]

PCmag just posted this:
On Tuesday, Advanced (not American)Micro Devices finally announced its "asset smart" strategy, which, as expected, involved spinning off its manufacturing operations into a pure-play foundry company. The new foundry company will be temporarily known as "The Foundry Company". AMD will own a minority stake, or 44.4 percent, with the majority owned by the Advanced Technology Investment Company, a wholly owned fund by the government of Abu Dhabi.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2331941,00.asp

Abu Dhabi is a super-rich Persian Gulf island city-state, next door to the Saudis.
The average net worth for Abu Dhabi's 420,000 citizens is AED 62 million (US$ 17 million), and more than $1 trillion is invested worldwide in this city alone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi

A number of stories have appeared on this, but none seem to mention whether the Bush Administration has examined the national security aspects of this major technology transfer...

[SingSing]

Read that this morning. Wafer Fab is such an expensive operation, the company needs to be cash rich to run it.

AMD also blames the profit short fall from the result of buying ATI.

[DarrellS]

Read that this morning. Wafer Fab is such an expensive operation, the company needs to be cash rich to run it.

AMD also blames the profit short fall from the result of buying ATI.

Yep. If AMD hadn't screwed up the AIW card, they wouldn't have lost all their ATI customers.

[jman98]

Yep. If AMD hadn't screwed up the AIW card, they wouldn't have lost all their ATI customers.

You're entitled to your opinion, but mine is that the AIW cards weren't all that great to begin with, so I'm having a hard time seeing how they could be more "screwed up" than they already were. I abandoned ATI for capture cards 7 years ago and never looked back. The performance was poor and ATI never took the video capture part of the card seriously, spendiing just about 100% of their resources trying to placate gamers who cared nothing about the video capture abilities of the cards.

[RLT69]

A number of stories have appeared on this, but none seem to mention whether the Bush Administration has examined the national security aspects of this major technology transfer...

You mean right up with China manufacturing Hard Drives or Deutsche Telecom buying shares in a US wireless company...it's a joint venture between AMD and Mubadala Development Company...

It's something we like to call capitalism - it kind of happens alot in a global economy. Kind of like the NYSE buying shares in the Indian stock exchange.

8)

[ahhaa]

RTL- no, that's not what I mean...

There's this strangely naive psuedocapitalist myth that trade automatically leads to peace; but I'd point out that both our Revolutionary War & the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were brought on by bad 'global trade' policies.

[RLT69]

There's this strangely naive psuedocapitalist myth that trade automatically leads to peace

I was pointing out this a simple capitalistic venture.

In no way would I argue that trade would lead to peace. Trade is trade nothing more nothing less. It could lead to peace, it could lead to genocide. All businesses care about is shareholder value.

8)

[DarrellS]

Yep. If AMD hadn't screwed up the AIW card, they wouldn't have lost all their ATI customers.

You're entitled to your opinion, but mine is that the AIW cards weren't all that great to begin with, so I'm having a hard time seeing how they could be more "screwed up" than they already were. I abandoned ATI for capture cards 7 years ago and never looked back. The performance was poor and ATI never took the video capture part of the card seriously, spendiing just about 100% of their resources trying to placate gamers who cared nothing about the video capture abilities of the cards.

Yea, you've been telling me how sorry ATI is for years, now. That is your opinion. I never had any problems with my AIW card and it captured much better than this Hauppauge card I own now. I could capture MPEG or AVI and use different codecs and settings to capture AVI. I'd still be using it if it could handle HD video.

I can only capture MPEG transfer streams with the Hauppauge card and I have to use special programs to convert the files to something that I can edit since TMPGEnc will not handle the MPEG files that I capture. The software that shipped with the Hauppauge card is a piece of crap and the analog TV tuner is pathetic.

Funny that you would attack ATI for being a gamer card when AMD has always been about gamers. Visit the AMD forum and that is all you'll find. You won't get any help with multimedia problems and the only people who can read the website are gamers that don't have a problem reading red text on a black background..

[SingSing]

If ATI AIW is an important part of the business, then that business is gone.
I own teo generation of AIW, paid about $200 or more each time.
I bought a $99 DVD recorder, with a handful of DVD+R/W, I get all my recording/transferring done. Never look back.