Octave Orgeron: Fujitsu Out-Sourcing to TSMC

Well according to reports, Fujitsu is divesting itself of semi-conductor fabrication and out-sourcing it to TSMC. This is not as surprising if you consider the amount of consolidation in the technology sector. This is something that has already happened in hard drive manufacturing where IBM sold out to Hitachi and in July Toshiba will own Fujitsu's hard drive business.

What I find really interesting is that Sun had already selected TSMC to fabricate the ROCK or UltraSPARC-RK processors and the next generation Niagara processors. Fujitsu was already producing the SPARC64 processors for the SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers. It'll be interesting to see if TSMC will be manufacturing the SPARC64's as well in the near future. It's unfortunate that Texas Instruments will not build a next generation fab for the Niagara chips, but it is an expensive investment. Even AMD has spun off its chip manufacturing business due to the expenses involved. This leaves Intel, Samsung, TSMC, IBM, and the Foundary Co. as the major chip manufactures for processors.

While there was speculation that Fujitsu would buy Sun, considering how Fujitsu has been divesting itself of manufacturing hardware, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense. The SPARC Enterprise servers are not manufactured by Sun or Fujitsu, only certain parts are. The rest is manufactured and assembled by Flextronics. Even HP sold off its share of the Itanium and Alpha business to Intel. To make things even more interesting, with the rise of SSD storage in servers and storage arrays, the future of the storage market will have little to do with spinning disks anymore and a whole lot more to do with chip manufacturing. This is something that Intel and Samsung are investing heavily into and even Sun has worked closely with both to further this trend.

The Niagara processors have been ahead of the general purpose CPUs in the multi-core and multi-threaded game. It is interesting that since the introduction of the T1000/T2000 servers, Intel and AMD have stepped up on the creation of dual, quad, etc core processors. Even IBM has realized that Sun was right and is now having to eat its own words against CMT as it develops the Power 7 processor featuring multi-cores and threads. Another trend in this area is the inclusion of features such as memory controllers and large caches into processors. Of course the UltraSPARC-T2 and UltraSPARC-T2+ processors have additional features such as cryptographic units per core, on-board PCI-E controller, on the UltraSPARC-T2 a 10GbE controller, and on the UltraSPARC-T2+ SMP interconnects. The concept of a "system on a chip" will continue to expand and become prevalent.

Read the original article: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com/2009/05/fujitsu-out-sourcing-to-tsmc.html