Over the weekend conspiracy theorists perked their ears about an announced change in the way AMD will purchase 32nm chips from Global Foundries.  What seemed to be odd was the inclusion of the term "paying per good chip", something that is not done in the industry, even with horrible yields such as we saw with TSMC’s 40nm process.  A call this morning filled in the missing details and SemiAccurate was there to report on it.  The long and short of it has nothing to do with yields, as they are still looking good.  Instead it seems like a way for AMD to ensure they have good supply of 32nm chips no matter how the actual production lays out and are not stuck paying for unusable chips while at the same time giving Global Foundries a way to get some money out of AMD if yields and sales are high.  This is very good news for companies like ATIC and Mubadala which have a stake in both AMD and Global Foundries.

Much ado about nothing: AMD and Global Foundries supposed tiff - General Tech 2

"The AMD (AMD) and Global Foundries Wafer Purchase Agreement (WPA) that was released yesterday made little to no sense. On a conference call today, AMD’s Interim CEO Thomas Seifert filled in the missing pieces, it all makes sense now.

Few things are more beloved by journalists than a 5:30am PST financial conference call, but this one was worth it, especially in light of the questions left hanging by yesterday’s announcement. We stated that on the surface, it sure sounded like AMD was tearing Global Foundries a new reticle for use in debugging their 32nm process. That however contradicted the facts we had heard on the ground, as of late last year, there simply were not 32nm yield problems. So why was the press release written the way it was, and is really going on?"

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk