Some of our friends around the industry commented on our recent news-story in regards possible low yields of AMD’s x86-64 processors (check it here). They told us a lot of interesting facts about AMD, but probably the most interesting stuff they said concerns the current yield of x86-64 and Thoroughbred processors.

Firstly, I should point out that Thoroughbred’s yield currently achieves amazing 80% what is a lot more compared to 60% we reported before based on the information announced back in may 2002. Furthermore, the cost of manufacturing one single core should be below $10, what is also less than it used to be two quarters ago. Due to astonishing yields, AMD can sell their Thoroughbred CPUs for low price, still having some space to lower them more. Unfortunately, this is not enough for the company to become profitable. In order to achieve high revenues and earn a lot, AMD should offer something a lot more powerful than Intel. It already happened in the year 2000, when the world’s second CPU maker’s sales were more than $4 billion.

As for the yield of x86-64 processors, everything should be fine in terms of yields themselves – the number of chips produced is sufficient, but there is a problem with frequencies of the chip. At the moment there are still some issues that do not allow AMD to clock their x86-64 CPUs at high core-speeds. This is the reason why the company decided to go with the Opteron a bit earlier than with the Athlon 64 that is postponed till the second quarter.

In fact, UMC is ready to produce AMD CPUs, all AMD needs is to ask them. Due to the fact that AMD can fulfill all the orders at the moment, the company produces their chips on their own shiny Fab30. At the moment the first batch of AMD Barton CPUs should be in production in Dresden, Germany.