AMD representatives have confirmed that the company will partner United Microelectronics (UMC) to produce chips based on 90nm manufacturing technology at a plant in Singapore. Eventually, the companies will also build a joint venture facility that will produce chips using even thinner, 65nm, technology.

In fact, it is not a big news now, since the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer already told at “UMC Technology Forum 2002” that AMD was going to partner UMC in an effort to develop and introduce new semiconductor manufacturing methods, especially, 90nm, 65nm processes as well as Silicon-on-Insulator technology.

Although spokesperson have not disclosed the timeframes of introduction first commercially manufactured 90nm processors at AMD/UMC facility, we can guess about this quite easily. It is known that UMC will start manufacturing code-named Barton Athlon XP cores by the end of this year using 130nm technology; in 2005, the company will begin making semiconductors using 65nm process on a joint venture facility. Keeping these facts in mind, I can state UMC will unveil its first commercial chips manufactured using 90nm technology in about a year or a bit more. Concerning that AMD has no plans to extend current K7 family`s life longer that until 2004, it becomes quite clear that by the end of 2003, UMC will manufacture AMD`s x86-64 CPUs.

As always, AMD is quite fast with updating their family of products.