AMD Founder Jerry Sanders Rare Interview

I was madly in love. Unfortunately, being madly in love maybe isn't enough to make a marriage work. So when I was quite young, three or four, they separated. My first memories were when I was about five years old, going into my grandparents' house, having been dropped off by a streetcar at far too young an age. In today's society, you'd never do that to a child. Maybe you shouldn't have done it then, but I ran into my grandparents' house and they weren't there. There were some workmen I didn't realize at the time were workmen, I was only five, in the kitchen, and they said, 'Well, your grandparents don't live here anymore.' I was absolutely terrified. My mother had dropped me off and I had... housekeeping in a kitchen while a new GE kitchen was installed, so we got a new GE refrigerator. But I was terrified. That doesn't mean I associate GE with being terrified, but it's my first memory as a child. I had an interesting childhood being raised by my paternal grandparents. My grandfather was the first Sanders in generations, the only Sanders until me, that ever had a college degree. He had a degree from the Armour Institute, which is now Illinois Institute of Technology, in electrical engineering. He was a graduate in 1906. In 1906, they didn't even have AC current; they only studied DC current. So it was kind of an interesting background as I went through... the effect on me of wanting to prove him wrong. So I did quite well in school. I was blessed with a pretty high natural intelligence, I guess, and I graduated as the valedictorian of my high school. Then I had to make a decision as to what to do with my life. You talk about dreams as a child. My dreams as a child were just to enjoy life. I didn't have any aspirations as a high school student to be a ham radio operator or anything that so many people in high-tech did. I never even thought about it. I just wanted to have a happy life. But I knew in order to have a happy life, you had to make a living. My grandfather drove that into me: you have to make a living, so you should be an engineer because if you're an engineer, you can always get a job. Because I wanted to own my own car, and I never had a car through high school, which I consider a tremendous setback even in the early '50s. I was more interested in making sure I could have a car than going to a university. But God smiled on me, and I went to the University of Illinois. The University of Illinois has turned out to be a phenomenal school for engineering, electrical engineering in particular. As I take this interview, I'm very proud of the fact that my company has endowed a chair, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois. I have to tell you, back then I never thought anything like that would ever happen. But I went to the University of Illinois and... not good. Turns out I'm the oldest of 12 children, and by definition that makes you maybe rich in spirit but maybe not so rich in financial terms. So I started out as a chemical engineer, and to my chagrin, I discovered that chemical engineering was in the school of Liberal Arts and Sciences. So I really wasn't involved with a group of people that I thought of as engineers; they were all liberal arts people. So through a set of circumstances which are well documented, I returned to the University of Illinois and transferred into electrical engineering. I will be eternally thankful to God that I transferred into electrical engineering. Turns out my... the Chicago area, where you didn't have a transparent society. In Chicago, as soon as I told people I went to Bloom High School, Bloom Technical High School I might add, that immediately classified me as working class. I felt like I was never really accepted. I thought, 'This isn't good.' Whereas when I'd been in California briefly one summer, I realized that in California, anything east of the Rockies was foreign territory and nobody knew anything about that. So I thought, 'I'm going to go to California where I can be judged on my merit, where I can go for fame and fortune.' So I moved to California in 1958 upon graduation, and I went to work... like a very serious guy. I guess I really wasn't. I was 21 years old, and Southern California looked good to me. I wanted to live near the beach. I went to work for Douglas Aircraft Company, and amazingly, I was put in charge of a project. I was very, very young, but I was put in charge of a project which was called developing the pitch trim compensator for the DC-8. Actually, the guy who was really in charge of the project was just wrapping it up and leaving to go to Lockheed, but I finished it off. They decided I'd done a reasonable job, so they put me in charge of developing the air conditioning control system for the DC-8. A company named Colorado Research... sensitive to voltage transients and spikes. Of course, on a 28-volt nominal power supply in an aircraft, there's plenty of spikes. That system just did not work. So I was given the task of redesigning this thing, which I did. I began to work with power transistors to build a regulated power supply so that we wouldn't be able to screen out all this transient activity. I contacted Motorola. Motorola Semiconductor was manufacturing power transistors and Zener diodes. A Zener diode is a diode which has a breakdown at a certain voltage, so anything beyond that was damped out and absorbed by the power transistor, so you had a regulated power supply simply... groomed. He didn't know a damn thing about his product line, but he offered to take me to lunch. We went out to lunch. He drove a new car, took me to a nice lunch, a better lunch than I certainly could afford as an engineer at Douglas Aircraft Company. I decided then and there that I had been on the wrong end of engineering. So I applied for a job shortly thereafter at Motorola as a sales engineer, looking forward to the day that I could have a nice car, good clothes, and more money. Well, it turns out Motorola thought I was a little young, so they hired me on as an applications engineer. I worked at Motorola helping other uninformed Motorola sales engineers with what... Michigan, Northern Indiana, the outskirts of Chicago, Northern Illinois, and all the way down to Sangamo Electric in Springfield. I was quite successful. I was so successful that a company named Fairchild, which I hardly knew anything about—whereas Motorola was a household name in Chicago from the days of car radios—contacted me to interview. They really thought I would be a great candidate and they'd like to have me join their company, or at least talk about it. Well, I had no interest in leaving Motorola for a company named Fairchild in Northern California. But I agreed to an interview on the proviso that it could be over a weekend. My plan quite... marketing manager, a guy named Tom Bay. These guys were super smart guys. They introduced me to another feisty little guy who was running a diode operation, called John Ready, who just couldn't tell me enough about how great this company was. He didn't have to tell me; I was a smart guy, I figured it out. Then I met Bob Noyce, and my world changed. This was the smartest man I'd ever met in my life. He was congenial, he was engaging, and he was just so smart. He talked about the things they were doing, and I thought to myself, 'Gosh, I just really have to go to work for this company.' So that was the end of my playing around in California for the weekend. Instead, I went into my mode of 'How do I get a job with these guys where I want to be?' What they really wanted me to do was be a sales engineer... place I want to live, and didn't think a lot more about it. But once I got to... anyway, I got the job. I left Motorola in early '61, and my life has just been incredibly great since then. From '61 through '68, I was just thrilled with what was going on in our industry. We were changing the world. Fairchild had invented the silicon planar transistor, they invented the monolithic integrated circuit. Bob Noyce was there for any bright young employee to talk to. The rest of the team was motivated highly to be number one in the industry. It was just a wonderful period of time as we were inventing new things. Few channels, one through 13, and half of those were just static. But all of a sudden you had UHF, so every TV had to have a UHF tuner. To have a UHF tuner, you need a very high frequency oscillator. Fairchild had a transistor, the 2N1211, and it was a dynamite transistor. So from that technology, we went out to go sell these things against an RCA New Vista. RCA New Vista was a solid-state device sort of, but it still had a cathode, so it had a limited lifetime as opposed to a transistor, which in theory had infinite lifetime. So I went out there, and the only problem was... product for about a buck for this device. That was kind of a setback for us. But I had this great conversation with Bob Noyce and Tom Bay at Bob Noyce's house. By this time, Bob was already a wealthy and successful fellow with a beautiful home. We met on a weekend, and he offered me a beer. I never drank beer, didn't want to cloud my mind. We started talking about this, and I said, 'I think we can sell this product, but they can only afford to spend less than $2, and they have to see a way to get down below a dollar.' Bob proceeded to tell me about what they were doing about shrinking the technology. Of course, we've learned since then that that's the magic of semiconductors: you just keep building... my role, my title was a great title at the time: Director of Entertainment Sales. Sounds like I was selling booking agents or something, but I was actually calling on consumer customers: TV, radio, stereo. Fairchild was moving from being primarily in the military electronics supply chain to consumer and industrial. I guess the point I'd like to make with that was it just showed that there was nothing we couldn't do. Later on, what Thomas Wolfe wrote about 'Masters of the Universe'—he didn't have it right. The Masters of the Universe weren't the guys who were selling stocks and bonds on Wall Street. We were the Masters of the Universe. We were changing the world. Semiconductor technology will let you do things you could never do before. Semiconductor with new technology and a marketing drive to change the world. It was a wonderful place to work, but it had a character flaw. The character flaw was called Syosset, Long Island. That's where Fairchild Camera and Instrument was headquartered. They were the owner of Fairchild Semiconductor, and all the cash flow and all the money that was being made was flowing into their pockets and being dissipated on not-so-great other activities. Meanwhile, the contributors at Fairchild weren't making very much money. But worse than that, as I got to the end of my time there, the company was being starved for capital investment. We couldn't even afford to buy the testers to ensure that we were meeting the specifications. It was grim. I thought this was a tragic situation for a company. I'd remind you that at the time, Texas Instruments was already a giant company when Fairchild got started. Fairchild got started in '57, as I recall. '58, Bob Noyce invented the integrated circuit, the monolithic integrated circuit. I joined in '61. But by '67 and '68, we were in a serious retreat. As I say, having won the Minuteman program away from TI with our new technology and our innovation, we lost the second go-around to a TI approach which was the wrong approach. But because we didn't really have the support of corporate back in Syosset, we didn't have the capital... that was in 195... sorry, 1968. At the time, I was still the worldwide marketing director. By that time, I'd been elevated to worldwide marketing director. Still, I was very young and thought we could still change the world. Dick Hodgson, who was the president at the time, was a guy I had great admiration for. I was given a bunch of stock options and told that the world was going to be great. Then when the world wasn't so great and Fairchild had a cutback, they decided they needed some new management. We were shocked. Bob Noyce left, as I said. Charlie Sporck, who had been general manager of the business, left to form National. Charlie hired... that I would someday be the president of Fairchild, that there was no limit to where I could go. They laid some more stock options on me, and I made the mistake of staying. Turns out it was the right thing to do as life worked out, but I didn't know it at the time. Anyway, Charlie Sporck basically said I'd made a terrible mistake. He found out that the reason I decided to stay was that I had misspoken. Up until now, I wasn't yet the worldwide marketing director; I was a sales manager. I said I wanted to be the worldwide director. If I would have joined Charlie, I would have been. But I said I wasn't going to stay on and not be... Tom Bay said, 'Well, how much time will you give me?' In my brash youth, I said, 'Till Friday.' I think this was on a Monday. On Friday, Don was terminated, and I was made worldwide marketing director. I was shocked. So there I was, 30 years old, 31 years old, and wow, the world was my oyster. But as it turns out, Fairchild had to change managements. Charlie Sporck left, Tom Bay was promoted, it didn't work out. They brought in a whole team of guys: Lester Hogan, Hogan's Heroes. Very interesting time. Lester Hogan is a brilliant guy. He made Motorola quite a success by automating the production of transistors. He seemed to want to make them over in Motorola's image. As I said, I was a brash young man, and I couldn't help but tell him why I thought a lot of things he was doing was wrong. But I guess I should take the time to tell one story that cost me my job. We went to visit Digital Equipment Corporation. Those days it was called DEC; now it's just called Digital, now it's gone, it's part of Compaq, which is now gone, part of HP. The founder of Digital had a meeting set up with Les Hogan, and we went to meet with him. When we got there, I had properly... 9300. Ken Olsen, who was the founder of Digital Equipment, was quite a good engineer. I thought he would be very responsive and receptive to our pitch on why these were a superior way to assemble a computer and why they were built with a system in mind, as opposed to just being random collections of gates. We talked, and Les said to Ken, 'So what do you want us to do?' Ken said, 'Well, you know, I got a problem. Texas Instruments has their Series 54, and there's a lot of sources of that. You're a sole source on the Series 9300. It sure would make my life easier if you just agree to build Series 54.' Advantage was down the tubes. All we had now was the opportunity to be an alternate source to TI, who was already a giant manufacturer. Afterwards, after the meeting, we were walking outside. I was just really so upset. I'd worked so hard, my people had worked so hard, all the engineering people had worked so hard to win that design. All we had to do was say, 'Series 74 is not competitive with our solution. I'm sorry, but this is the way to go.' I know he would have gone. I mean, you could tell he was just shocked that we agreed. So Les Hogan said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'I think you just wrecked the company.' Story out and move on to AMD, which is the pride of my life, short of my daughters, of course. One day, I decided—which is amazing in retrospect—that I was the best candidate to run the semiconductor operation. As I mentioned earlier, Fairchild Camera and Instrument, of which Les Hogan was the president, was the parent company. But he was also acting as vice president and general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor, which was really the heart and soul of the business. At some point in time, it was pretty clear he was going to name somebody to be president of Fairchild Semiconductor, at least I thought he was. So I said, 'I throw my hat in the ring.' I remember Les saying to me, 'Well, Jerry, of course, whatever you want, I know is whatever you want to do. I'm sure that's the right decision, and I'll support it 100%. But you know, when you're 31, 32 years old, you say... I said, 'You know, Les, I can't guarantee my behavior.' Oh, wow. So not guaranteeing my behavior was perceived by Lester as a threat. So he hired a guy from TI to replace me, and bingo, I was out. So there I was, a couple of kids, no job, terrifying. Enough severance pay, thanks to Les's generosity or maybe guilt money, to figure out what to do. To my amazement, several groups of people... well, I'm never a guy that likes to look back. So looking back three decades is tough, looking back four decades is even tougher. But I guess I'll really never forget the origin of AMD and how I started that, or how I was part of the starting of that, because it was really an amazing kind of story as I look back on it. I had no idea what I was going to do after having lost my job. I knew that I only had a few months of pay, and then I was going to have to do something. Because of the circumstances under which I left, considered to be a brash iconoclast and accused of not having the customer's interest at heart, even... really over this is really a terrible place to be. But as I said, to my amazement, a few people approached me. First, got a young man named Jack Gifford, who I'd worked with at Fairchild, who had an idea to start a company to make linear integrated circuits. That was interesting to me, but frankly, linear integrated circuits in my view were a niche opportunity. Although the analog world will always be with us because that's what the real world is, I just didn't see that as an exciting thing. Whereas I was more interested in the digital world, where you could build more and more complex things and take advantage of the ever-shrinking transistor sizes, which has been the driving force behind the... fired, being again an outspoken guy and didn't fit the mold of the Motorola team that had come over from Phoenix, came up to me and suggested that we start a digital integrated circuit company. Well, it turns out when I looked at John's skill sets and I looked at the skill sets of Jack and his team, I thought they were complementary. But nobody ever started a company to build both digital and analog circuits at the same time, since the processes are incompatible and not going to be an easy thing to do. But I saw it as a bigger playing field. Frankly, I guess there's a certain perverse joy in thinking if we built digital circuits, I'd build those 9300 MSI circuits which Les had ceded and had gone instead just to be an alternate source. I think there's certain poetic justice. I was going to be an alternate source. Named Sven Simonsen together, who was a design guy. I said, 'Okay, now John can build them, and Sven can design them, and I can sell them.' So there's the digital circuits. Jack was a marketing guy for linear. He had a couple of good design people and product people: Larry Stanger, Jim Giles, Frank Botte. So all of a sudden, there we were. We had seven guys. Then I brought in Ed Turney, who was a longtime friend, to be the sales guy. That was the first of the problems, because Jack Gifford said, 'We don't need a sales guy. You're a sales guy.' I said, 'No, I'm going to be the president. I'm going to be the president. I can't be the sales guy.' I knew I was going to be on a steep learning curve because I didn't know how to be president. But it turns out they didn't really want me to be president anyway. All they wanted me to do was raise the money. They thought I could raise the money. He was an engineer's engineer and brilliant at that, but not a money raiser. So I took on the task of raising the money to start AMD. I wrote the business plan and developed the program to go out to raise money. Bob Noyce often tells a story that it took him five minutes to raise $5 million. As I like to say, it took me five million minutes to raise $5. I went around trying to talk to people like Arthur Rock, who had been an influential venture capitalist at the time. I talked to everybody. It went something like this: Number one, 'We never bought back a company run by a marketing guy.' Number two, 'It's too late to go in the semiconductor business.' Number three, 'All of your people are...' different tribes. I'm from the sales tribe, and the sales tribe thinks there's nothing you can't accomplish if you put enough energy into it. That's the way I've always lived and felt, and that's what I did then. So I went out and I raised $1,550,000 to close on the $1.55 million closing number that we needed, and AMD was born. Shortly after we were born, Jack Gifford began his campaign to undermine me, to get the guys to throw me out since now they had successfully gotten the money they needed to do what they wanted to do. Jack really wanted to be the president. But it turns out nobody wanted Jack to be president except Jack. So maybe at first they thought, well... money by the fall of '69. But by 1970, the industry was in a terrible downturn, and companies were going away. We actually were going to need some more money. I remember this meeting very well because we used to have these founders' meetings. One night, we said, 'Hey, we got to raise some more money.' I said, 'You know what? If we raise more money, we have to give up one-third of our stock because the deal we had made was we each got a certain amount of stock, but there was a 50% kicker if we could take the company public without raising any more money, unless the investors waive that.' Everybody said, 'Well, we don't really have a choice. We don't get more money in here, we're not going to be able to be successful. The market's terrible. So we need to do this.' No, Jack, I don't lose it. One to nothing, because you guys don't get a vote. We are not going to give up one-third of our stock. I will find a way to not do that. So I came up with the idea: we're going to have to raise some more money, but I figured if we gave the investors something new, we'd be able to do it. So I said, 'We're going to expand in MOS.' Now, think about this. This was a tiny little company with an analog capability, a digital capability, and now we're going to get an MOS capability. Wow. But MOS, of course, was the coming thing. Of course, we didn't know anything about MOS, but again, I figured I'd get some people together. So we raised another half a million dollars. We didn't give up our stock. Within a few short years, September of 1972, two and a half years after founding the company, with... tough slog, because we started out just being a replicant, if you will, a second source to existing products. People called us copyists. People said we had the least chance of survival of any company. People said we didn't bring anything to the party. It was really amazing because some 33 companies were formed in 1957, I'm sorry, 1967, '68, '69. Only two of them are still here as independent companies: AMD and Intel. It wasn't that I didn't want to be an innovative guy inventing new and exciting stuff. We didn't have enough money to do that. I saw the market opportunity to actually get to market faster by offering something the customers wanted, which was an alternate source. Denigrating us were all making second-source devices, but they all used cross-reference charts. So if there was a Fairchild μA741 operational amplifier, Raytheon had some RN6571 which was cross-referenced. Well, that was very tough for the customers to figure out. TI had Series 7400. If somebody else came out with a product, they called it something else, the SPRA5839 or something, and that was cross-referenced. So I said, 'You know what we're going to do? If there's a Fairchild part that's called a μA741, the AMD plug-in replacement is going to be the AM741. If there's a National Semiconductor part called the LM101A, there's going to be an AMD plug-in replacement... 1488.' Well, nobody had ever done this. It seems so obvious. We got sued by everybody. Everybody came, 'You can't use our number.' I said, 'We're not using your number. We're just using a generic numeric with an AM in front of it. Everybody knows it's AM stands for AMD.' So they between an AMD product and a Fairchild product, and we prevailed. We became phenomenally successful. We grew rapidly to the time frame of 1975. We had just become a $50 million company, $100 million company. I wanted to be a billion-dollar company, a $10 billion company. We couldn't out-invest or out-produce these bigger companies, so we had to out-innovate them. The other thing we said, or I said, was 'People first, and products and profits will follow.' I said, 'We build a great team of people, reward those people, let them know what they think is important, and they're going to come up with great products. We'll market them properly, and we're going to make money.' It's really amazing because everybody pays lip service to that people count, they're the most important resource. But AMD was the first company to give every employee shares of its stock. We were the first company to go to cash profit sharing. We were the first company to put in programs where if we made certain goals, tremendous incentives were rewards to people. Bitsliced microprocessor, the 2901, which became the building block for all of Digital's computers and Data General's computers. Interestingly enough, it was later replicated in an integrated form by my good friend and colleague Wilf Corrigan at LSI Logic, Incorporated, all those building blocks into his gate arrays and custom circuits. But the interesting thing was that we said then, and we say now, and it's pretty hard to have in an industry as dynamic as ours the same mantra for 33 years. But that mantra was 'Building blocks of ever-increasing complexity to improve the performance, reduce the cost, and shorten the time to...' earned a billion dollars net after taxes in 2000 on nearly $5 billion in sales. For the last five years, we've been in the top 25 companies in the world in US patents granted. Last year, we were number 13. We continue to move up. We even have more patents granted last year than Hewlett-Packard or Intel, who are considered to be wildly innovative companies. Through it all, I think we've been true to our value to the people, which is 'People first, and products and profits will follow.'

We were just tremendously bright people that wanted to do wonderful things in technology. I don't know if it's widely known, but Gordon Moore was actually the one who created the concept of Intel. Gordon basically was frustrated with the inability to get R&D developments into production at Fairchild and decided he just wanted to go do something else. Bob Noyce at the time was a group vice president, and Tom Bay was the vice president general manager of semiconductor. Charlie Sporck had left by... to get the support from corporate to do what needed to be done: the equipment, the investment dollars, as well as the reward. Whereas Charlie could offer them an opportunity with stock options, the magic lure even back then: 'Come over here and get a chance, build a corpus, build some wealth.' So it's all about people. When that stream of people started to leave, some had already left. Some had formed Signetics, had been formed by Jay Last. Jean Hoerni had left, another founder of Fairchild, to form Intersil. This exodus of people was natural at the time because a new industry was being created. But I think when Charlie left, and I love Tom Bay, he was really a great guy, but he... culture of Fairchild. Fairchild was up until that time a rowdy bunch, but we had a common goal: to build great products and bring them to market and beat everybody on the planet. It was a very, very different mentality. So when Fairchild then was under the offices of Wilf Corrigan, who's a very, very smart guy, he'd already lost the momentum to other companies. I think it was inevitable that Fairchild would eventually just dry up, which is a sad thing. When you think about it, there's some poetic justice to the fact that Fairchild wound... products and simple things as opposed to following what I consider to be the right strategy of building blocks of ever-increasing complexity. So it was a sad thing. But you know what, there's a time and a place for everything. Just as I'm sure people could tell great stories about when the bean fields of Beverly Hills were being converted to mansions and movie studios, Fairchild had its place. But that era of the semiconductor industry was largely gone by the time AMD got started in 1969. It was kind of a new world, a much more professional world. Some of the roughhouse tactics that Fairchild embraced just didn't have a place anymore. But it is an interesting thing... think what it really was, simply put, is what Schumpeter said. Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, said growth will occur when the entrepreneur is given the opportunity to innovate and the ability to participate in the fruits of his innovation. That's what didn't happen at Fairchild. The innovators weren't properly rewarded. Syosset corporate was kind of taking it over and just wasn't a good place to be. I think that AMD and National were the antithesis of that: give the opportunity for these guys to innovate and be rewarded for it. I think Intel was too, in the early days. Now Intel has come... organization called FLAME, and it stands for Former Loyal AMD Employees. I understand there's a similar organization, but they're all 'I Hate Intel Employees' and they're all former Intel employees. I think, 'Wow, that's kind of touching to think that you create an environment where people consider themselves part of a large family, and even when they're no longer with the company, they want to maintain that universe and that community.' I'm very touched by that. So here we are, 33 years old, and we've still got a sense of family that I think is unique in our industry. I think you get loyalty by being loyal. We've actually been very loyal... encourage people to compete, but as a team. Then the people just feel that they're really not able to participate, they kind of leave on their own. The organism rejects them, if you will. I think that's a better way. So what is in 2010? How many organizations will have wafer fabs? Well, you know, wafer fabs cost more and more to build all the time. The cost per square inch of silicon keeps going up all the time. In order to get a return... process technology was so unique, and I think that sort of ran out somewhere in the '80s, where people just had to have their own process technology. They developed the process to work with a certain design, and they built an integrated circuit. Then as people became more sophisticated, when you were pushing leading-edge technology, there was always one company who was at the forefront of that technology. They worked with the equipment manufacturers to spell out what equipment they needed to build whatever process they were building. For a long time, that was IBM. IBM was a technology leader, so they worked with the equipment makers. The equipment makers saluted IBM and made the process equipment that would satisfy what IBM's needs were. Then for a... then it became Intel for a long time. Now it's the foundries in Taiwan. Realistically, the Taiwan foundries are driving the equipment industry. They're building massive capacity. I think Taiwan is currently producing about 30% of the silicon in the world, which is an amazing thing for this small island. They build foundries, and then people just use that standard process to build their designs on. The only problem with that concept is whenever you have a standard, it means a standard process. You're not optimum. For certain things, you want to be optimum. Servers get a lower cost solution as a result of semiconductor technology. So I believe that going forward, people will see that we're going to have to collaborate. However, what technology are you going to put in there? Because technology is invention. Most of the process patents are held by AMD and Intel and IBM and maybe even TI now, who are making substantial R&D investments. But the only way you can afford to make those R&D investments is that you can recoup them by large volume sales. That means you're going to have to have partnerships. But that means that you have to control the process technology. Now it turns out that's why I think there's only going to be a... 2010, AMD is going to have one in 2007, 2005, 2007 probably peaking production by 2010. Maybe it's going to be 30 nanometer. It's going to be interesting. When it goes below 30 nanometers, I get scared because I don't know what to do below 30 nanometers. But they tell me nanotechnology is going to solve that for me. So we'll see.

Okay, I'd like to just add one more thing if I could before you sign me out of here. I'm delighted to get off the hook. But I was thinking about the changes over the 40 years or so that I've been involved in this business. As I say at the very beginning, it... point where process technology will continue to evolve, although within a narrower sphere of companies. Manufacturing will no longer be a distinguishing difference. There'll be a level playing field thanks to equipment makers and subsidized capital and the globalization of the world. So it's all going to come down to content: who's going to have the great products. That says really you got software and you got the silicon, and these guys have to work closely together so that silicon can deliver the power of the software. It's all about content. They have to really work close together because the box maker is just like a car assembler; that's not where the technology is. But developing and delivering a solution to the customer, that's the future. That's why... technology is so complex, I'm going to help you use it. Well, that's okay. But that says you have to continue to have complex technology, and you have to make it easier for the guy to use. To me, that's a combination of software and silicon. Put those two together, make them intuitive, make them voice responsive. You won't have some guy showing you how to do it. You'll be able to do it because you've built it into the software and into the hardware. I think that's what we can do with a billion transistor device. If we continue to work collegially, I think our future is bright in software. I think our future is bright in silicon and whatever comes after silicon, but only if we work together and not... thank you.