However, The Inq says AMD will be able to renegotiate its contract with Intel in 2010, which could give it an opportunity to sell part of its remaining stake in the fab company.

Ah, yes... a favorable (to AMD) deal with Intel. Yes, I really do believe that pigs can fly, courtesy of wings provided by "the Inquirer" and its idiot contributors.............

... isn't fab 30 under retooling to go from 200mm to 300mm wafers?...
(which after retooling will become fab38)

Nvidia has no fab ,so what maybe is a good thing .

"Real men have fabs."

selling off the bricks and the mortar in hopes of piling paper on the desk...... doubtfull, a stiff wind and it's all over.

There is enough AMD to form three companies:
- A company for pure fab.
- A company that designs CPUs/GPUs/chipsets
- A company that takes reference designs of GPUs and sells them to OEMs, retail, etc.

This is just a convoluted way to issue more stock in order to pay off debt.

Now that investors are actually paying attention to things like risk and valuation again, I don't think this is going to fly.

I'd love to hear from the AMD apologists again about how buying ATI was such a brilliant move. AMD's market cap is now LESS than the price they paid for ATI. That is, old AMD + ATI < old ATI.

if they have all this unused fab capacity, why the hell don't they make more chips? why the hell do they have contracts with other foundries to manufacture their chips?

I call BS on the whole premise of the article being they have 'oodles' of unused capacity.

if they did, it would make more sense to simply start offering foundry services to other companies

If they have so much un-used fab capacity, they might be better off selling it.

I don't think this would be a good idea. Not really.