If you wonder what that AMD/TSMC deal will mean for you, the effects of this tie-up are very simple: TSMC has a massive output capacity. TSMC manufactures more than two thirds of all chips sold by ATI, Nvidia, VIA, Conexant, Marvell, FPGA manufacturers and FPU accelerators. TSMC is considered the world's largest foundry today. Even if AMD puts restrictions on the use of SOI, TSMC is likely to gain experience to develop and enhance its manufacturing technologies with SOI wafers, including lucrative "half-node die shrinks". One of the potential cash cows is the scaling of 45 nm SOI to 40 nm SOI. This also applies to the 32 nm process and its half-node shrink.