During the Q3 conference call, AMD CTO Dirk Meyer revealed that AMD Fab 36 is currently making 45 nm chips. He didn’t specify what kind of chips, but if it’s processors AMD is way ahead of schedule, and that just doesn’t seem very probable at the moment. AMD is still trying to make the 65 nm process output good yields with the K10 architecture, and we can’t imagine that AMD already has working 45 nm processors already. All in all this is good news, but AMD’s plans to close the manufacturing process gap to Intel to only six months is looking a bit steep. Intel will announce its first 45 nm desktop in three weeks, which means that AMD will have to launch its first 45nm processor in May, 2008. It just doesn’t seem very likely right now.
