AMD to make Compaq Alphas?

Chip company AMD today declined to either confirm or deny that it will take over manufacture of Compaq's DEC Alpha chips. As reported here earlier, a common motherboard will allow K7 users to upgrade to faster Alphas, as and when they become available. Rana Mainee, European market research director at AMD Europe, said: "We have no plans for producing Alpha chips that I know of. We have enough demand for our K7 chips on their own." According to sources close to Compaq, AMD's Dresden fab, which opens in Q3 this year, has the technology to produce fast Alphas. The deal is a strange echo of a situation some years ago in the UK. Then, AMD was interested in Digital's fab in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh, Scotland. However, it could not afford to buy the fab as AMD was then going through troubled times. ®