Hardware Upgrade: Good morning Giuseppe, could you tell us what your position at AMD is?

Giuseppe Amato: I am AMD's EMEA Sales & Marketing Technical Director; I'm superintendent of all the technical specifications of AMD's x86 family of products and of AMD embedded solutions that are distributed on the European, Middle Eastern and African markets. Consequently, I’m also involved in the technological matters related to AMD GPUs and chipsets.

Hardware Upgrade: In recent weeks a rumor has spread that AMD, starting next year, will completely leave the manufacturing scene and instead rely on partners for chip fabrication. We have been rather skeptical of this rumor, so could you give us your point of view about it?

Giuseppe Amato: That rumor is the result of a misinterpretation of an announcement that our CEO, Hector Ruiz, made. He was saying that AMD will leave the care of manufacturing and production to partner foundries only for parts that are not an intellectual property, IP. This does not imply that all AMD manufacturing will be decentralized. Only standard technology parts will be outsourced for manufacturing to our partner factories, which will result in an economic benefit for us.

Hardware Upgrade: For us, the rumor came across as rather odd after seeing the large investments AMD has made in its two Dresden factories and the increase in productivity that has been a result of the two factories.

Giuseppe Amato: Dresden plays a vital role for our development. Inside these factories we have reached the technological level that we need to produce our most complex architectures. Just think of the SOI technology, Silicon On Insulator, as a model of technology that justifies the existence and exclusiveness of our factories.

Hardware Upgrade: On the other hand, AMD acquired ATI, which has been a fabless corporation for a long time. Your thoughts on this?

Giuseppe Amato: "Fabless" is in fact the manufacturing model that we will employ for the production of our GPU and chipset products. The fabless model is very widespread: just think of Nokia. It doesn't have any of its own foundries and so appoints the manufacturing of its architectures to external partners. However, the fabless model is also hard to handle. It is imperative to understand which parts will be outsourced to partners for production and, on the opposite end, which parts will be produced in our own manufacturing centers.

Hardware Upgrade: What do you think is the largest benefit AMD has received by its acquisition of ATI?

Giuseppe Amato: There are serveral benefits that AMD received from the ATI acquisition, but the most important is probably the following: AMD changed from a processor company to a platform company. We are now able to provide our customers with complete solutions, balancing the CPU, GPU, and logic management of the motherboard, while also still leaving full flexibility with our partners in case they intend to use other brands with our CPU or GPU products. AMD is an open corporation and believes in platform development. However, AMD platforms are not to be restricted to AMD products only.