http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13139

AMD, the second biggest x86 CPU designer behind Intel, today announced that they are spinning off their fabs (CPU maufacturing plants) in a joint venture which will be majority-owned by Abu Dhabi investors (the Advanced Technology Investment Company). Abu Dhabi will also buy a greater stake in AMD itself. The new company has a placeholder name of The Foundry Company.

This was done because AMD has large debts and is losing money every quarter. This strategy will allow them to pay off some debt and focus on their core CPU and GPU design business.

Since the new company will produce microchips for companies other than AMD, the manufacturing process will be more generalised to a mass-market production technology. This may allow AMD to produce some or all of their GPUs there instead of outsourcing that production to TSMC, a Taiwanese foundry.

Aww, I thought they were going to split into AMD and ATI.

How would they counter Larrabee/CUDA? AMD is going to really push Fusion (becuase their CPUs suck and their GPUs don't, and that's their one advantage over Intel).

This is the structure of the deal.

And this is why they did it.

This should make things interesting...