AMD screws up on lithography

The biggest surprise in AMD's results earlier this week was the effect of a problem with high speed K6-2s which went unnoticed by everybody apart from US chip title Electronics Buyers' News. Well done those people. We should have noticed it -- but were affected by Sydney A/B flu. Don't try this brand of flu yourself, it's tiresome. Regular readers will remember a series of articles we wrote at the end of last year about a problem running K6-2s which needed a patch. That patch should have been free (and was eventually put on AMD's site) -- but wasn't made available for some time. But this one, apparently, was different. During a conference call with analysts in the US, AMD CEO Jerry Sanders disclosed that the company lost around $50 million because of the problem, caused by a faulty lithography process. ®