Slashdot Mirror
AMD's Fab 30 Revealed
Harkids writes "AnandTech posted a
sweet article about a recent trip to AMD's newest chip manufacturing plant,
Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany. The article is more than just a walk around the building;
it includes juicy details of AMD's microprocessor manufacturing process, innovations,
and even has some Hammer info in it. A good read if you are interested in CPUs
or simply what AMD has up their sleeve."
now maybe we'll see a chip at 1/2 intel clock speed but twice as fast!! (oh wait, they already have those)
i would put a joke about the fab 5, but i don't remember what the fab 5 is so fuck it.
That area flooded a few weeks ago, and I heard someone say that luckily the plant didn't get destroyed. (aparantly, a few inches of water are enough to render a silicon fab useless)
This makes me wonder how vulnerable the chipmakers are... One good fire, flood or earthquake and we're without cpu's?
Imagine the sabotage posibilities... (hey Intel, for 1M, I'll wipe out amd ?)
A lot of people have been worrying about the recent 'dumbification' of stories on Slashdot like exercise bike games, non-existant decisions and what lawyers can learn from manga! But Harkids and Michael rush to save the day with this gruesomely geeky stuff:
it includes juicy details of AMD's microprocessor manufacturing process
Yes! YES! JUICY DETAILS OF PROCESSOR MANUFACTURE! YES!!
Slashdot is SAVED!!
mogorific carpentry experiments
Direct link to the article on one single page and without ads
"There is one thing that's for sure; AMD has not done a very good job of telling the public exactly what they're capable of from a manufacturing standpoint. Intel has been talking about their manufacturing capabilities for quite some time now and has left the market with the impression that they are the only leader in the x86 manufacturing world. It is a shame because in reality, AMD has quite a few accomplishments of their own to talk about but it's just a matter of getting them to loosen up and let you all in."
It is nice of AMD not to scream about what they can do in their labs, but actually rely on their current products.
We are 1 month into 2003Q1. 2003Q1 is when it is supposed to be released in limited numbers. How is that 4-5 months behind schedule?
I once did a gig at someone who manufactured fab equipment, and we all had to take this 3-day safety course, even those of us just working in the server room. And mostly it was 3-days of "This is chemical [insert name here] and it will kill you in [insert time here]. The way you will horribly die is [insert pain here]. So be careful." They made it sound like the room was full of gas that would eat you alive like that stuff from The Rock.
Intel may have tried to make the guys in the bunny suits cute, but after learning some of the dangerous stuff they're around I came to respect them for sure.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Intel recently scrapped plans to firebomb the AMD Fab30 plant. When reached for comment an Intel spokesman said "The war for the desktop processor market is mostly over." AMD has declined to comment.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm the senior Information Technology (IT) chairman for the state of Maryland's public schools from grades K through 12.
We plan on harnessing these new fabrications from the AMD chip maker and using them in all Web, file, and multimedia servers, as well as in every desktop on every desk in every school in Maryland.
Kudos to AMD for keeping up with the Intels and the Microsofts.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
check out the specs for the hammer line... P4 can't touch it.
The combination of the Fab and the Dresden Design Center (DDC) was said to require a $2.3 million investment, with close to $2M already spent...
At that price, any Tom Dick or Harriet could set one up!
Of course, the next sentence makes it clear they're talking BILLIONS, not millions:
and the remaining $300M due to be used by the end of 2003. For an advanced microprocessor fabrication facility like Fab 30 this is the going rate for start-up costs, which is a major part of the reason why there are only two big competitors in the desktop CPU market; with such high barriers to entry, it's very difficult to become a mass market competitor in the CPU business.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
If Apple started using AMD processors we'd have the ultimate 'x is dying' case, especially with the ability to tie BSD in there too.
In fact, I'd expect the x-is-dying folks like yourself are just creaming their pants at the thought of such a possibility.
By any chance were the /. editors on this tour?
(BTW here's a tip: Click on "Print this article" to see the whole article at once, ad-free, without having to wait for 7 pages of ads to download.)
The combination of the Fab and the Dresden Design Center (DDC) was said to require a $2.3 million investment, with close to $2M already spent
Those figures should be billions (G$), not millions.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
John, Paul, Ringo, George.. who are the other 26?
Trolling is a art,
Thanks for that piece of information. I thought Intel was a company that was based 1.5 miles away from me in my home town of Swindon in the UK. They used to be at the end of Pipers Way just up from Croft Road. They must have moved...
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Bullshit. I have a feeling your "specs" are "how many addresable bits does the processor use"
It's great to see all the amd fanboys yell, "MHz doesn't matter!" (which is totally correct) and then turn around and drool over a new 64 bit "extension" (I won't call it a full 64 bit chip). Show us a speed increase for desktop, server, or enterprise server applications.
And cheat the advertisers of their pound of flesh? Get rid of the adverisers and the alterntive is pay-per-view.
It doesn't cost look at the ads.
I'll bet the "skip commercial" button on your VCR remote is worn to a nub.
Google knows nothing about AMD + Tombstone. I call bullshit.
> two years ago when they switched development >to Hammer for a full 64 bit architecture.
LOL two years ago, really ? the X86-64 programmer manuals were already out 2 years ago, not to mention the Hammers project inception ages before that. If for some reason you enjoy to fake to be an ex-insider try for your next hoax to check your facts first
way to go with the anti-AMD trolling - I might have to add your techiniques to my uber-troll database, better to aid my quest for the perfect troll post!
That was classic intercourse!
From when did it get juicy, CPU manufacturing process?
The future of Personal computing seems bleek to me.
Kind of Orwellian. This DRM bullshit is going to criple the PC. If AMD is going that route I will not buy another box from them. It seems to me too many vendors are getting bribed to jump on.
Well I'm going to start purchasing parts to fix what I have and enough parts to build several new boxes for 6 years from now. I don't care how fast the new boxes will be, if the hardware must run in DRM mode I don't want it. Not because I am a theif, it because it's going to slow down the box and also
create problem for use honsest people who write our own code. I believe this is going to cripple coorporate America. DRM isn't going to be forced
on users world wide, just here in the US. I am urging apple not to take the DRM road. If they don't , who knows, they just might gain market share again. I though AMD was going to abandon DRM.. they choose to embrace it. Too bad, only INTEL would have suffered. Now AMD will suffer the same fate. Then again, if the public does not know any better , then DRM could win.
Hopefully Apple will not take that road and perhaps educate the public with advertising.
DRM is Evil.
FYI, Hardware Analysis has an article on the AMD Dresden plant. They were invited to an AMD Media Workshop there.
5 80/
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1
A bit short but they've got two pictures of the plant.
- hama -
Did you remember back in 1999 when RAM prices went up, up and away, in a marked that's normally in a steady decline? That was (mostly) an earthquake in Taiwan knocking out plants.
While the AMD fab is quite a bit away from the river, up in the hills, other natural or unnatural disasters could be pretty severe.
However, it's not like the marked would totally collapse, AMD may have one main plant, Intel has a couple, UMC or whatever AMDs partner was called has some and I'm sure there are more flash etc. plants that could be converted on a longer timescale.
Of course if you had coordinated gro... *stops* *pullls out his Men In Black-zapper and zaps any Al-Quida associates reading this*
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Then there was talk of reviving it in 2000, only for the entire thing to be delayed once again until 2002, when the need for general expansion made the development of a new plant in Europe critical anyway. The old plans were dusted off, and now AMD has the plant it deserves.
The article says:
AMD was founded in 1969 and the Dresden Fab began mass production in 1999 thus covering 30 years, which is where the '30' in Fab 30 comes from.
The fact that the Dresden plant has been producing chips since 1999 indicates that you are just making up your facts in the hopes of getting some suckers' mod points.
Further your claims of 16384 48 bit registers are patently absurd. The x86 chipset has eight registers. Nowhere near the thousands you claim for this alleged Tombstone project, which as others have already indicated Google cannot substantiate.
Moderators, please think before you press the moderate button. This poster is clearly whoring for karma.
erm, I don't think that Intel is actually BASED in the UK. It's an American company you know...
That was classic intercourse!
I mean, seriously, folks. I've been out of the technology loop for a good half year now (and there's another half year on top of that where I was just coasting), and even I'm not slow enough to mod this one up. Sixteen thousand 48-bit registers? *Think* about it!
... pepperoni and copper interconnects.
And Dresden has been running for quite some time, producing tons of 30nm copper interconnect (y'all do remember copper, right?) chips.
Still, Tiger's post got modded up to 5, so I guess that it's a phenomenally successful troll. It just irks me. It's like having an article on Microsoft's Windows code and having a comment about Microsoft switching over to gcc modded up!
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
Grove: So, what do you want on your TombStone, Jerry?
Sanders: Ummm
Grove: Aye, [shouting] TOMBSTONE PIZZA, CRAIG!
... is that the Hammer is being mass produced and is actually going to ship!
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
the Hammer/x86-64 chips have ondie memory controllers AND more registers than i386++ type chips, combined they'll give a speed increase of not inconsiderable proportions.
> We are 1 month into 2003Q1. 2003Q1 is when it is supposed to be released in limited numbers.
;)
> How is that 4-5 months behind schedule?
Not that I want to help the troll to whom you respond, but the Hammer was initially projected for a 2001 release. Barton was initially slated for something like early to mid 2002. Of course they're late. But they're not so bad as the aforementioned troll mentioned. Their processors are far more competitive than, for example, when they had the K6 family. It is simply that it's been over a year since AMD's processors were definitively faster on the highest level for Microsoft Windows (they still have an advantage, iirc, in prominent Linux benchmarks). And AMD is only seen by the general geek public as "equal" to Intel if their processors are simultaneously unarguably faster and cheaper. Right now, they're merely almost as fast and generally cheaper, so people get confused as to whether or not the company still exists.
But I digress. The AMD processors in question, just like most AMD, Intel, Motorola, Sun, IBM and HP processors, are much delayed.
-JC
surely, even if you knew absolutely NOTHING about the next generation of AMD chips you could ASSUME that - since the current Athlon XP offers 80-110% of the performance of the P4 depending on application - the next generation will be AT LEAST as fast as the existing P4. If you add to that the various preview tests that have appeared and the MPF discussions, there's every reason to believe that the Athlon 64 / Opteron will be a very capable device.
That was classic intercourse!
I really wish apparently technical essays here were not scored by a god damned popularity contest ...
My my my CPU hits me so hard
Makes me say "Oh my Lord"
Thank you for blessing me
With all those cycles and two quicks gigz
It feels good when you know you're down
A super dope CPU from the D-town
And I'm known as such
And this is a CPU uh you can't touch
With apologies to everyone with any taste whatsoever.
The PowerPC was designed to make it easy for M68K users to migrate to it, which is why companies like Apple and the remnents of Commodore are indeed/have indeed done exactly that. It has considerably more than the M68K's 16+internal registers, IIRC (it's been a long time since I looked at the specs, but one of the hallmarks of RISC design is to use the space that would have been devoted to complex instructions for more registers instead.)
16384x16 48 bit registers? I doubt anyone is going to come up with such a design any time soon. But simply having a different number of registers to an 80386 isn't entirely unlikely, even for a CPU with a legacy x86 compatability mode.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ok, in order:
- The chipset's name was TwoStone. Wags involved in the testing phase refered to it as TombStone. It was supposed to refer to the fact that two "different" CPUs were on the same silicon chip. Not that you'll be able to Google for it under the correct name, I've never seen anyone else refer to this project.
-
It wasn't 16 banks of 16384 48 bit registers, it was 16384 48 bit registers divided into 16 banks. The first 11 or so were equivalent to the x86 registers, and a flag in the status bit was used to determine which mode the CPU was running in and which bank of registers the processes had access to. As I understand it, Intel mode actually took the form of a ROM emulation of the x86 chip. Remember almost all modern CPU architectures, with the exception of the x86 range, have hundreds of registers.
-
The TwoStone project was cancelled two years after it started, not two years ago. And, yeah, I've got it all fumbled over the Dresden plant. This was built in 1999, and the question looking over my papers was whether it should be extended in capacity to build TwoStones. As I understand it, in 2002 that's exactly what they did.
Yeah, I screwed up... my bad. Sorry about that.Racists should be sent back to where they came from
They just posted another bigger article with a bunch of pictures and even a video. Check it out at http://hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1581/
It says in the artical: "While both AMD and Intel are working towards introducing Fully Depleted SOI in a matter of years, only AMD is introducing PD-SOI."
I thought that the Prescott was going to be released on SOI, though maybe I got that mixed up with strained silicon.
Anybody know?
It seems to me that purchasing the Alpha would be a great deal for AMD. They are already in a position to design and manufacture it.
In addition, many still depend on the Alpha, and this would give AMD the server market it's always wanted, and has been trying to secure.
All this is not mentioning that the Alpha's perfomance has always been far better than x86. Just imagine what would happen if AMD came out with a 8GHz processor a year from now...
Just a little ranting from someone who does not want to see the Alpha go, and still remembers the potential they hold.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why wouldn't you call it a 64 bit chip? The natural size of a pointer doesn't qualify it? What about the natural size of an int? Is a 386 a 286 with 32 bit extensions?
What would you call a 64 bit chip? Please provide your reasons.
AMD's Fab 30, Simply Fabulous5 81/
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1
"I doubt anyone is going to come up with such a design any time soon. But simply having a different number of registers to an 80386 isn't entirely unlikely, even for a CPU with a legacy x86 compatability mode."
As an example of that in action, the AMD Hammer chips have an extra 16(?) general purpose registers accessible in x86-64 mode.
Back when Intel just released early 75Mhz and 100Mhz Pentiums, Alpha with their advanced CMOS process was pushing 600Mhz on RISC chips.
Nobody bought it.
Their sales people couldn't convince consumers that superior technology was worth the price. They generated no excitement! They hoped that the technology could speak for itself.
I've been told by a long time Alpha engineer that long time clients would call him directly asking about new products, bypassing the sales rep. At the same time Sun sales team was attacking like wolves and stole the high end server market.
The result is that Intel now owns most of Alpha technology including the engineering teams. The last Alpha EV7 system can do up to 256 MP, and 256GB RAM, all on high speed ultra-wide packet switched interconnect bus. HP has to play down its performance to justify moving to Itanium servers.
The first Itanium has problems with more than 4 MP. Thank you Mr. Capellas.
> the Hammer/x86-64 chips have ondie memory controllers AND more registers than i386++ type
:)
;)
> chips, combined they'll give a speed increase of not inconsiderable proportions.
It is notable to, er, note that the former advantage helps (possibly considerably) towards both recoded AND legacy (eg, normal) programs, whereas the additional physical registers would require recompilation in order to show a benefit, which means that everybody but Windows users will get an immediate use outta that.
Other advantages of the Hammer? Well, not counting the 64-bit yunk (that WILL provide benefits, but I want to cover benefits that will help legacy programs, like Civilization III, The Sims, Unreal II and other antiproductivity applications):
Hyper Transport. That's not much on its own, but it essentially equates to a reduction in loss of bandwidth to the chipset and between processors when you add an additional processor. On the Intel setups, the processors share a set amount of bandwidth to the chipset, so putting eight chips on a 2.4GB/s bus means that you have each chip getting 0.3GB/s. The AMD setup theoretically lets each processor get that 2.4GB/s. Of course, that's in a perfect world, chip-level, but it probably amounts to some benefit. AMD's K7 family has similar advantages, which probably assists in explaining why they get higher performance at each given clock in mainstream applications (which at least somewhat depend on the memory subsystem) even though the AMD cpu to memory bandwidth was usually 2.13GB/s (now it's 2.67GB/s, unless you count stuff like the nForce, which has some extra memory bandwidth, but the extra benefit there is eaten up by the onboard video), whereas the Intel cpu to memory bandwidth was usually 3.2GB/s. Anyway, the idea is that HyperTransport will (on a hypothetical level) make it much easier to make n-way systems without either a tremendous performance impact or an expensive crossbar workaround setup thingy.
SoI. Silicon-on-Insulator. This is one of those things that'll help with the process technology. In the end, it'll probably offer a little bit of a frequency boost by making the chip a little cooler or something like that. I forgot precisely what SoI's primary benefits were. It's been months since I've even thought about it.
Stages: As detailed here, the K8 adds two stages to the decoding part of the instruction pipe. The decoding part of the pipe is probably rather complex, so you may see a pretty neat frequency boost over the K7 family without the problem of a huge branch mispredict penalty. The number of cycles that a cpu wastes when it makes an incorrect guess on a low level "if/then" statement is somewhat proportionate to the number of pipeline stages. The AMD K6 and (iirc) Cyrix 6x86 were the mack daddies of branch prediction, since their pipes had only five stages or so, so they only had to wait a few cycles when they zigged instead of zagged. The PIII and K7 had over ten stages, so they had to wait a lot longer, but other advantages (such as the larger and sometimes faster caches and more accurate predictors) in those processors over their predecessors did their best to overcome this disadvantage. The Pentium 4 has a crippling 20 to 28 (depending on the situation, and depending how the trace cache handles the situation, and whether or not you want to count it) stages. This means that it can hit amazing clock frequencies, but it'll get cranky and drowsy for twice as long when it makes a predictive mistake. How does it get away with this? Well, the trace cache does its best to assist, but it didn't really help as much as I think the designers were hoping. But for multithreaded programs and OSes, the SMT implementation on the more recent members of the P4 family, an implementation known as "Hyper-Threading", probably pretty neatly alleviates much of this problem by putting operations from other threads into the cpu whenever the currently running thread stalls on a branch mispredict. The K8/Hammer approach is just to add stages where they hopefully will have the most balanced, beneficial effect to frequency boosting while only minimally increasing the branch penalty. SMT would be nice, but it isn't nearly as critical a need as it is on the P4.
Wider memory access. On the Sledge Hammer, if AMD's plans are still the same as when I wrote this, the memory controller (which is embedded onto the cpu) will access PC2700 memory in a 128-bit configuration (ignore the "126-bit" typo on the linked page -- I can't believe I didn't notice that when I typed it nearly a year ago!), which leads to a 5.3GB/s path to memory. That's damned good, though I really think AMD should have focused on 366/183MHz (equiv to "PC2933") or 400/200MHz (equiv to "PC3200") memory instead of the 333/166MHz PC2700 that came out over a year ago. Still, servers often use memory that's lower than bleeding edge clock in order to maintain reliability, so bleh. Still, 5.3GB/s isn't bad for a setup that isn't based on a shared bus.
Enhanced branch predictor. Well, that's if my notes from a year ago are accurate. If true, this'll probably overcome any mispredict penaly performance disadvantage from those abovementioned added stages.
Larger TLBs, TLB flush filter, etc.. This stuff will have itty bitty advantages on a per-clock performance basis, but every little bit helps.
Larger caches. Hey, I should look this up to see what they're planning on. Is it just 512KB on-die L2, or is AMD planning on bringing it up to 1MB L2? The interesting thing about AMD's designs is that the die is really small on each processor. Remember how AMD has gotten occasional fire for processors overheating? Well, aside from a stupid lack of shutdown diodes in the past, the real cause wasn't that the AMD processors used more heat than the Intel processors. They usually generated about the same amount of heat, often less, but their processor surface area was substantially smaller, which made the chips less expensive to produce and less likely to have defects. But when you try to push an equal amount of heat through half the surface area, you end up with a higher amount of heat per area, which equates to a higher running temperature. The funky thing about this is that you could just added a whopping huge amount of on-die cache. That'd increase performance while also increasing the surface area. But the heat production would not be substantially affected. So you'd end up with a lower temperature processor. So the Hammer will have a higher ratio of cache to processor units in the cpu, so it won't be as much of a fire hazard. Frankly, they should have put 1MB on-die L2 onto the Thoroughbred/AthlonXP.
Crap. I need to research more on the K8. It probably changed a lot since I went into hibernation. The interesting thing is that in the last half year, I've largely moved from being a Windows 2000 power user to a Linux coder (I still use both operating systems for several different purposes, but I'm talking primary usage). I stand to be in the group that benefits most from the Hammer when it comes out, since I'll be able to './configure && make' or 'qmake -project && qmake && make' most of the programs I use and/or develop. So I'll instantly see the benefit of those extra registers. ^_^
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
I call bullshit on your call of bullshit. Besides, isn't actually called TwoStone?
Also check out AMD Rumors which covered the topic pretty well in 1999. Also Ars Technica carried a good story about it in 2000.
Really great CPU. I gather the fact that Hammer was more capable and that the best performance they could manage out of a 333MHz TwoStone running in Intel mode was equivalent to a 266MHz Pentium II, sank the chip.
Racists should be sent back to where they came from
"...Fab 30 was nothing short of impressive; much more impressive than we had imagined before ever setting foot on the campus of AMD Saxony. The technology and engineering talent at Fab 30 can rival even that of Intel, but obviously on a smaller scale."
Here's hoping that AMD survives and prospers with their Athlon XP64. The future would look a little gloomy if the only choices for us were Intel's Pentium 4 or Itanium.
Btw. you can check the numbers on cias factbook:
:) (LOOL).
;)
www.google.com -> cia factbook -> click the first hit.
(by the way, its fun to compare US with other countries) - All numbers speaks against the country, exept perhaps military budget..
(and another thing, the US state is officially christian - look at the dollar-bills for example, bahahhaa)
The first link is a 404, the second one talks about the K7 only (and weddings and such).
So much for that.
Don't most of the current gen 64 bit processors actually only have 48 bit memory pointers? If I remember correctly, (could be wrong), these 64 bit processors have 64 bit precision, but memory pointers are limited to 48 bits. I believe Alpha's, Intel's, and Sun's chips are like this...
HF can easily penatrate rubber gloves becuase of its size. And you're right, F has a huge affinity to replace Ca in your bones. This can lead to catastrophic failure of the bone under normal loading (your muscle twitches). Now, doesn't this make toothpaste sound scary (most tooth paste has NaF (sodium Fluride).
Both these statements don't fully make sense to me:
"Also large areas of this market use either Novell or WinNT. Both are unavailable for Alpha at the moment"
"Windows 2000 can be bought along with most new Alpha systems."
Huh? Okay... first quote: um... obviously you can use NT 4, are you meaning win 2000? As for the second quote, have you bought an alpha with windows 2000 installed? from hp? I was pretty sure alpha support didn't make it past build 2128 (for professional)?
Tiger, your story makes no sense, sorry
Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the ... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and ... there's a final, very addled
humorous
rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the
seats locomote through a short tunnel filled with clock-work dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs are depicted without accuracy and too close to your face.
"One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to
aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like,
but Exxon has decided they smelled bad.
"At the other end of Dino Ditch
message about facing challengehood tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this,
but the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't have anything to do with
energy policy and neither do you."
-- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell"
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