AMD's split called GlobalFoundries

Brand-new fab company, borne from the ashes of AMD past - and some sexy naked die shots too!

We mentioned that AMD were splitting their design and manufacturing team into two pieces just a few days ago, and the company has finally been completely formed and named.

Until now it has just been referred to as "Foundry Company", but it has finally received a name that is actually very cool - GlobalFoundries.

They've completely inherited AMD's old Fabs, and will be constructing all-new ones in the near future based on 32nm. They are still linked very heavily with AMD, but aren't owned by them any more (though AMD has a large amount of shares).

For the forseeable future, GlobalFoundries will have AMD as the only client and continue to produce all the Phenoms, Phenom II's and Athlons that are out today, but it is possible that it may pick up other contracts in the distant future.

Here's a quote from their site to show just what they're about:

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi announced the creation of a leading-edge global semiconductor manufacturing company to address the growing demand for independent, state-of-the-art foundry production capabilities.

This venture isn't going to mean too much to the average enthusiast in the short term - chip prices should remain the same, and there shouldn't be any less of them from the initial switchover - but long term we should see a quickened pace of innovation from the green team thanks to their ability to focus on just the design.

Not only have they got all the new fabs over in Dresden and many other places, but they've also got a brand-new website to show off some drop-dead sexy shots of the CPU wafers too. The site still redirects to AMD's site, but we expect them to host the images very shortly.

Just check out this one of the Phenom dies on a 300mm silicon wafer in 45nm:

It's going to be interesting to see if this foundry split is just the thing that AMD needs to get off the ground running, but until then we're going to be ogling this very sexy tech - they even have ultra-high res (4992x3328 @ 300dpi - 16.2MB for the fullsize above is linked on their page!) shots of the wafers that would be very colourful wallpapers.

Fingers crossed!