This post highlights Intel (INTC).

Who Says We Don’t Make Anything Anymore?

It seems every day we are inundated with job loss numbers and proof of the demise of American manufacturing. This is perfectly legitimate given the times we living in, but when a firm spends $7 billion inside the United States I think we ought to talk about it.

Intel (INTC) is bucking the layoff trend and investing in the high paying American jobs!

Intel announced today that they will spend $7 Billion (over 2 years) to build advanced chip manufacturing facilities inside the United States. The majority of the outlay will be spent in the firm’s existing sites in Oregon, New Mexico and Arizona. These are high paying, highly technical jobs.

Intel’s workforce in the US is over 45,000, and while the company generates 75% of sales from outside the United States it manufactures 75% of its products inside the US. Further, 75% of Capital expenditures and Research & Development costs are spent in the U.S.

The technology used in Intel’s manufacturing process builds chip circuitry 32nm (32/billionth of a meter or about 1/millionth of an inch) across – incredibly small, atomic level structures. These are faster smaller chips that consume less energy. The code name for the architecture is Nehalem.

Intel shipped the first Nehalem products in the September quarter. Nehalem, the new CPU microarchitecture, is expected to be a significant improvement over the Core 2 microprocessor.

The most significant architectural improvement is the elimination of the Northbridge memory controller (the logic chip handling data moving to and from the main memory). The memory controller is instead integrated onto the CPU core, enabling faster data transfer rates and greater energy efficiency.

Initial testing of the chip shows significant performance improvements over existing Intel and AMD microarchitectures. Nehalem is being constructed in a manner that would allow quad and octo-core functionality. The processor will also incorporate DDR3 memory and enable the integration of 3D graphics processors on the same chip.

Management stated that the macro slowdown would not push out the launch of the product, as the greater efficiencies would help sales and also enable expansion into un-penetrated segments.

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