Bitmap Frogs said:
It's not that crystal clear. MS will insist on owning the design (I bet most of the folks there still remember the hair shirt it became using chips they didn't own) so AMD would only get a single fee for the design job. No royalties. Linking the deal with an exclusive manufacturing contract with The Foundry Company is tricky, it means MS would lose the power to negotiate manufacturing fees - unless the contract had a price-matching guarantee. It's the kind of setups that might end up turning into a bed of nails. |
Well no matter what really Microsoft is going to end up beholden to someone because as a company they don't actually make much of anything physical. They don't have a strong R&D arm with patents like Sony (who has a hard claim to the cell) so whoever they work with be it Nvidia, AMD, IBM or Intel, they will really not be able to have too much say in....anything, since they won't own any of the real technology.
They seem the least likely to work with IBM given the severe spats over Linux and server systems (IBM is probably the number one supporter of open source other then maybe Apple and Sun these days). With AMD though its not like they would be able to make too many demands, they'll have to just take what they can get since they don't own any patents or technology that can be leveraged. If AMD wanted to cut them off like Nvidia did they could just as easily.
If you think that a company like AMD or Intel is going to give rights to its transistor technology over to microsoft to make on its own thats just crazy. I don't think any of the big chip makers would give up their rights to that unless MS was going to make a HUGE investment in a new architecture ala Sony and Toshiba's collaboration with IBM on the cell. Without per chip royalties what incentive would anyone have to just sign over very complex and expensive technology rights to Microsoft?
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