AMD Dresden ships two million Athlons

Today, we take a break from producing the Pentium What4 Times, to recall our other favourite CPU maker: AMD.

The company said yesterday that cumulative shipments of Athlon chips made at Fab 30 in Germany have hit the two million mark. In September, AMD had shipped only one million units. The company aims to start operating it 0.13 micron production line in December 2001 (not at the end of this year as we - doh! - reported earlier), with the aim of getting chips onto the street early the following year.

There's plenty of room for manufacturing growth still - and, judging from AMD's recent sales results, it doesn't need to search quite so frantically to find another company, such as Motorola, to fund expansion.

Currently only 30 per cent of the floor space at Fab 30 is utilised. Today it has a manufacturing capability equivalent to 5000 wafers a week of 200mm wafers. AMD is targeting a utilisation rate of 50 per cent by the end of this year.

Jim Doran, who runs AMD's German manufacturing operations, said the company's two factories (there's also a fab in Austin, Texas) would fully meet demand in 2003, while "taking aim at achieving a 30 per cent share in the x86 processor market", AsiaBiztech reports (it comes to a pretty pass when you have to read a Japanese site to find out what AMD is up to in Germany). ®