TG Daily: If the adoption of code that exploits the capabilities of Fusion is too slow, would AMD considering developing applications for it - to accelerate the move towards a potential killer-application that takes advantage of the horsepower of the GPU?

Phil Hester: In terms of demos, yes. But we are much more into providing tools and enabling the ecosystem. We work, for example, with the financial community to look at software accelerators. The answer is, we do [application development] selectively, but we do not want to do that as a core business. On the consumer electronics side of things, it is a little different. If you look particularly at the DTV business, they actually like a pretty complete software stack, to the point that it is almost ready for manufacturing.

TG Daily: Since we are talking about the consumer space, there is an IT company that is closer to the consumer electronics industry than pretty much any other IT company: Would Apple be an interesting customer for AMD? Or do you feel that Apple is pretty much a territory that is occupied by Intel now?

Phil Hester: Well, Apple has to answer this question. But, yes, we would welcome any additional x86 customers. There is nothing I know of that is Intel-unique in their code. I would expect that you can run their applications on an AMD processor to the same degree they run them on processors they have today.

TG Daily: Let's talk about manufacturing. Intel is highlighting their lead in 45 nm manufacturing these days. How important is 45 nm in the industry right now?

Phil Hester: Customers don't buy nanometers. That being said, there is a reasonable window you need to be in within the industry, from a performance and a density standpoint, to stay competitive. Unfortunately, Intel has tried to portray nanometers as a single metric for competitiveness and that simply is not the case. If that was really true, why is it that Opteron outperformed Intel? [Opteron launched as 130 nm chip in early 2003, while Intel's competing CPUs were transitioned to 90nm in late 2003 - ed]

TG Daily: But smaller chips result are likely to result in improved production economics ...

Phil Hester: You can end up with the worst cost structure in the new technology, if your yields are poor to begin with. Where we really try to focus on is being in that competitive window I mentioned before. Then, we need to transition to a new technology at the optimal economic point. What we found is that if you don't push the absolute leading edge of the technology envelope and let the maturity happen for a period of time, the economics turn out to be actually better than pushing it upfront. Yes, you can't be forever late. But shipping first at a given level of new technology does not necessarily mean best cost.

TG Daily: Thank you for the interview.