A new company, GlobalFoundries, was established recently to manufacture silicon chips for computer processors. If you track keywords in the news (as some of us do), you might already know this: the appropriation of the term "foundry" by computer chip manufacturers has made the task a little less convenient than it might seem. No doubt someone who follows the snack food industry has a similar complaint.

On the other hand, without this automated news-sweeping capability I wouldn't know anything about chip production, or that the new company was the result of a break-up of Advanced Micro Devices, a once-hot tech stock that produces microprocessors, embedded processors, and graphics processors for servers, workstations, and PCs, and processor technologies for handheld devices, TVs, etc. 

GlobalFoundries will produce silicon chips for AMD, and others, and it plans to establish a new manufacturing plant in Troy, NY. All of this is good for the people in that area, and proved to be worth the effort of a writer at the Albany Times-Union. He took the trouble to examine the interesting background of foundries (i.e., metalcasting) in the region — which makes some interesting reading — and compensates somewhat for the frustration of following links that have no obvious relevance.