The Jan. 8 announcement that IBM Microelectronics would work with Advanced Micro Devices on process technology development at the 65-nanometer (late 2005) and 45-nm nodes essentially pits IBM against Intel.

And these two really do not like each other.

At the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco last month, IBMers were growling that Intel had taken unfair advantage of the conference by failing to more fully reveal its 90-nm strained-silicon process. Intel shot back that its competitors would have to wait until Intel's 90-nm silicon hit the streets to learn its "unique" approach to strained silicon. Competitors would be dissecting those same chips and doing microscopic inspections soon enough, Intel argued.

Technologists were equally uptight last summer, at the 2002 Symposium on VLSI Technology in Honolulu, when Intel presented no papers at all, prompting Big Blue people to wonder if Intel was taking but not giving back to the international process research community.

My gripe with IBM is that the company doesn't publish meaningful financial results about its semiconductor operations. Though analysts can estimate IBM's annual chip revenue, the company issues no profit-and-loss statement. We don't know how much of IBM's semiconductor research budget is subsidized by the server division.

IBM and Intel both run successful chip operations. If AMD decides to manufacture its leading-edge processors at IBM's new Fishkill, N.Y., fab, the industry will get a fairly good comparison: Intel's best process vs. AMD-IBM's, both on 300-mm wafers, in the X86 space.

AMD brings to IBM a method of rapidly improving its manufacturing flow. And AMD is street-smart: Consider the Athlon design, German subsidies for its Dresden fab, its DDR memory strategy and 64-bit Opteron road map. And as Kevin Krewell of the Microprocessor Report noted, AMD and IBM are "simpatico" in their belief that strained silicon on SOI substrates is the way to go.

So we have AMD and IBM combining their respective strengths against Intel, which is still twice as big in terms of chip revenue. With plenty of nastiness thrown in, the score from this match should be evident in a few years.

Hot dog, anyone?

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