Look out, Intel
The Shanghai models are made on an advanced 45-nanometer manufacturing process, which should make AMD's Foundry spinoff attractive to other semiconductor designers. That technology, developed in concert with IBM
The Shanghai core does more than merely shrink the chip traces. Both Microsoft
And like I said, all of this progress worked itself through AMD's design and implementation systems in record time, thanks to great manufacturing yields right off the bat, and what looks like a much tighter management team than the one that botched last year's Barcelona launch.
No product launch happens in a vacuum, especially in this tightly contested processor market. Intel is about to launch its own next-generation chip, with virtualization improvements and power-saving features of its own. And the computer market softened very quickly when the world's financial institutions took a sudden nosedive. AMD is supposed to give us a mid-quarter sales update in early December -- but so was Intel, until it moved that event up to last week.
That said, AMD remains a ridiculously cheap stock, and with its manufacturing division spun off, its balance sheet will look much stronger the next time we see it. The company can focus on great chip design, driving thorns in the sides of Intel and NVIDIA
Further Foolishness: