Intel/TSMC announcement call – Atom will be made by TSMC

Last week we were given the heads up that on Monday, March 2nd Intel and TSMC will be making a strategic announcement at the Intel executive briefing center in Santa Clara. The event is taking place right now and is being hosted by Intel execs Anand Chandrashekar and Sean Maloney and TSMC execs Rick Tsai and Jason Chen. During the conference call Anand Chandrashekar announced that the Intel Atom Processor will be made in TSMC fabs. Outsourcing chip production is an unusual move for Intel, as they have taken great pride building their own processors in-house. With Atom now being built by TSMC it would only make sense that the upcoming Intel Larrabee (GPU) be made by them down the road. Intel said that they have been working on this deal for 2-3 years and has no plans on not becoming a manufacturing company. They believe that down the road that manufactures will need to expand into more areas than they are now and by joining forces with TSMC they will be able to expand and better adapt to the market by opening up the door to new designs that they can build internally.