AMD Announces Quad Core Tape-Out

Gr8Apes writes "The DailyTech has a snippet wherein AMD announced that quad core Opterons are taped out and will be socket compatible with the current DDR2 Opterons. In fact, all AM3 chips will be socket compatible with AM2 motherboards. For a little historical perspective, AMD's dual-core Opteron was taped out in June 2004, and then officially introduced in late April, 2005.' AMD also claims that the new quad processors will be demo'd this year. Perhaps Core 2 will have a very short reign at the top?" From the article: "The company's press release claims 'AMD plans to deliver to customers in mid-2007 native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors that incorporate four processor cores on a single die of silicon.'"

Comments

Completion of the design

[benhocking]

Per TFA, "completion of the design". I was also confused by this phrase in the summary.

Re:Taped out?

[ZPWeeks]

Tapeout is basically when the processor design process is completed and the final plans are written down to be sent and manufactured. They call it "taping out" because they used to write the specification data to magnetic tape.

Software Licensing

[graphicartist82]

I'm interested to see if software companies who license their software by CPU will continue to define a "CPU" as a physical socket, or a core. Right now Microsoft and VMWare (and lots of others) define a CPU as a physical socket, not a core. So a dual core processor only counts as one CPU for licensing purposes.

It will suck if they start realizing how much more money they could be making by defining a core as a CPU for licensing...

Re:Software Licensing

[doh123]

back in the day, most all apps could not use multiple processors, and if you wanted the specialized version that could use more, you had to pay more because of the extra development costs and low sales.

Now, they do it because people are used to it, its accepted as norm... It doesnt cost them more but they can charge more just because people expect it. Its simple corp. greed

Re:Software Licensing

[aneurysm36]

i think the answer is- because they can.

here is a very interesting article on the subject of product pricing.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRu bberDuckies.html

Re:Software Licensing

[Amouth]

Back in the day the number of CPU's ment the number of threads that could be proccessed meaning the amount of work that could be done.. In essence One nice 4 CPU server could do the work of 4 smaller severs, software writers realized that if the licensed it per computer that large companies would buy once license and run it on a big box and not on several smaller boxes and get the same work done but with the software company not getting as much money.. so they made it so that you have do pay per cpu OR pay a whole lot for one server no matter the number of cpu's

and you question about RAM- somethings do have it but it is more in how much can be stored - for example the only real diffrence between exchange 2000 ent and standard editions was thathte standard had a limit on the size the store could be and how much memory it would use for caching..

Re:Software Licensing

[drix]

Once upon a time, the only people who had SMP machines had spent a huge amount of money on them. Licensing per CPU was simply a smart way to discriminate your customer base and figure out who had a high willingness to pay. Maximize producer surplus and all that. SMP became more and more commoplace in the 90s and now, with the advent of dual core, every grandma on AOL will be running on two or more CPUs in a matter of years. Since performance gains seem to be oriented towards more parallelism and not more MHz nowadays, this effectively means that software that runs on only one CPU has reached a performance plateau compared with everything else. My guess is the software industry will wake up to this fact and stop licensing by CPU, unless they want to field all sorts of questions about why theirs runs twice as slow as the next guy's.

Re:Software Licensing

[Amouth]

it is limited to the number of physical cpu's not cores or thread paths..

this is why you can have say dual p4 xeon's with HT enabled and XP will show 4 thread paths but you are not violating license - that and XP really doesn't care.. as it has no idea.. and isn't hard coded to die

Re:Software Licensing

[ACMENEWSLLC]

IBM has had Quad Cores since 2005. They are working on many more cores in their Power6 / Power7 lines;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER5

IBM has often charged per the CPW, or processing power and group level, for their software. They license the processor cores. You can have a box with 4 processors and be licensed for 3. If you want to use the 4th in the box, you pay an upgrade fee.

Interesting stuff.

Re:Software Licensing

[kabocox]

It will suck if they start realizing how much more money they could be making by defining a core as a CPU for licensing...

They'll wait until we all have 4 to 8 cores. Then they'll hit us for an 4-8x hit in licensing cost. They don't want to kill off multi-core processing for main stream use before it really begins.

Re:Taped out?

[imsabbel]

Its sort of going gold, with the exception that the latency is MUCH longer.
So even if a perfect, working design tapes out, it will take at least 3months until happy little chips come out at the other end of the factory. Of course, failures, bad yields or bugs that only manifest themself in the physical design can delay this further.

AMD++

[andrewman327]

This is a big bonus to AMD. With the competition between AMD and Intel so close now it will be interesting to see how the two companies change their tactics. I wonder what the power consumption of this new quad core will be. Power consumption and heat production are becoming increasingly important.

I am glad to see AMD making progress on its quad core chip. No longer can megahertz bring mega bucks. Moore's law doesn't mean Moore money. (Ok, I'll stop now.) We have seen more chip innovation over that past 4 years than I thought was possible.

In case you are wondering what the differences are between AMD and Intel in quad core designs, this comes from TFA:"Intel has recently accelerated its quad-core plans; the company recently announced that quad-core desktop and server chips will be available this year. Intel's initial quad-core designs are significantly different than AMD's approach. The quad-core Intel Kentsfield processor is essentially two Conroe dice attached to the same package. AMD's native quad-core, on the other hand, incorporates all four cores onto the same die."

I cannot wait for comparative benchmarks. I wonder how much ground Intel will gain by being first to market.

Re:AMD++

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The quad-core Intel Kentsfield processor is essentially two Conroe dice attached to the same package.

How can you take an article about processors seriously when they can't properly pluralize "die" as "dies."

I cannot wait for comparative benchmarks. I wonder how much ground Intel will gain by being first to market.

I suspect for the desktop market we'll all see that having four cores does not improve most application performance significantly because it does not ameliorate the normal bottlenecks outside the server space. And what is with Kentsfield and Clovertown? Are they both going to be the same thing when released or is the Xeon and Core 2 Duo still going to be seperate lines with different cache sizes and the like?

Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[Short Circuit]

Isn't AMD depending on additional cores to beat Intel's performance similar to how Intel's Prescott depended on additional MHz to beat AMD's performance?

Sounds like the shoe's on the other foot. I hope AMD brings back the kind of engineering innovations that brought it support among those in the know back in 1999 and 2000.. (Like focusing on a superscalar architecture with the K7.)

Four cores is a fine concept, but they mustn't forget to increase the capabilities of the individual cores.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[eebra82]

I doubt that the release of a quad core CPU has anything to do with Intel getting desperate. AMD has stolen a lot of market shares from Intel in the server area so it is only natural for them to extend the current line-up with even more, faster CPU:s. You know, there is actually a market for quad core CPU:s as many server applications will benefit strongly from such architecture.

Additionally, AMD gets to claim the quad core market before Intel, just like it got to 1000 MHz before Intel did. It's not only positioning, but also marketing.

Last but not least, you can bet on an entirely new architecture from AMD coming next year. As with all new CPU designs, this is a difficult, expensive and time-consuming project so it's not like Intel and AMD are ramping out new CPU:s too often. Instead, they try to improve current technology and make the most out of it.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[Gr8Apes]

In a word, no.

In brief, AMD is putting together 4 cores on a single die, like their current dual core design. Intel just got to the 2 cores per die stage. Their 4 core design is 2 dual cores slapped together.

This story is about the fact that the next gen of AMD's chips are design complete. More importantly, AMD claims it is going to have a working prototype this year. The importance of this is that if AMD succeeds, they will be able to display a working copy of their next generation CPU when Intel intends to ship their first quads. It could do untold damage to Intel's ability to sell those quads if AMD's quad solution blows it away, as I strongly suspect it will. So does IBM, HP, Sun, and Dell, as all have signed on for AMD to power their servers.

This puts the shoe firmly back on Intel's foot. I'm sure Intel was hoping to not wear it for at least a little while. ;)

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[Aadain2001]

As a poster above me stated, there is every chance that Intel could win this little battle. Sure, the four cores on a single die does allow for better communication between the cores and better use of the caches. BUT, because of the increase in space on the wafer for a four core processor, the yield rates may drop dramatically. Intel's solution side-steps the yield problem by simply joining two dual core processors into a single package. So, while AMD's processors may have a slight performance edge over Intel's quad chips, they may also be 2x-4x times more expensive and harder to come by.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[Gr8Apes]

This is the same argument proferred in the first round a couple of years ago when AMD went 2 cores on a single die vs Intel's 2 separate cores slapped together. Did we forget the outcome of that battle so quickly? (Refresher: Intel got their ass handed to them)

While I don't disagree with your point about the potential for increased failure rates of 4 cores on a die vs 2 cores, also note that we're at least one more generation advanced in fab facilities, which one hopes will help ameliorate the failure rates.

Also, think about this - there's more to the new AMD chips than merely 4 cores on a single die. So I don't doubt they'll be slightly more expensive than Intel's offering while trouncing them in every way. Sort of like the Core 2 today. The difference between them? Core 2 took 3 years after AMD's first Opteron release, AMD's response to Core 2 will be less than 12 months.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[smoker2]

This puts the shoe firmly back on Intel's foot. I'm sure Intel was hoping to not wear it for at least a little while.

No, this puts the shoe back on AMDs foot.

It may put the ball into Intels court, but thats another game entirely.

Hint : A shoe is a beneficial object that most people would like to have.
An example. - Your abusive boss of many years is demoted and you end up in charge of him. Now the shoe is on the other foot - your foot.

Putting the ball into someone elses court puts them under pressure to respond or lose out - ie tennis.

sorry for the nag, but use it or lose it.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[Short Circuit]

Research about what? The fact that AMD designed the Hammer core to use a switching memory interface instead of a bus interface? The fact that Intel's initial one-bus-tap-per-core system makes it difficult to keep bus speeds high? Not to mention I haven't found documentation that Intel has moved away from their multi-tap approach.

There's also the fact that most consumer computational loads don't yet scale across multiple cores. Sure, you might have applications that spawn ungodly numbers of threads, but that doesn't mean many of those threads are doing an appreciable amount of work. If you have a decent task scheduler in your OS, one fast core is still Good Enough.

AMD went beyond Intel with the K7. That core lineage performed more data per-clock that Intel's competing Prescott-based cores. Now Intel is working to outperform AMD's K8, while AMD seems only to be focusing on adding more cores.

Re:Taped out?

[crabpeople]

Its probably when they tap the chip assembly tray out so they fall to the counter. Just like muffins.

Re:I'm not a chip guy

[Diss Champ]

Tapeout is when the designers are finished with deciding where all the transistors and such are on the chip (layout), and the layout data files are sent over to the mask-maker to be changed to the masks (basically things you shine light, xrays, whatever through in order to put those designs on the chips during fabrication). Long long ago, actual tape was used for masks.

tee hee! "Taped out" !!

[Ancient_Hacker]

I bet nearly nobody knows what "taped out" means. Or why it's so funny.

Way back in the 1960's the way you designed a printed circuit board, or an integrated circuit, was to get a big piece of clear plastic and lay out the lines with red tape. They used red tape so you could see through it, in order to align the tape exactly over the layer below ( most PC boards use at least two layers, IC's at least 5 layers.) As you can imagine, a rather tedious, error-prone process.

When you were done with the tape and exacto knifes, you'd hand the plastic over to the foundry guys, who would photographically reduce each layer to the appropriate microscopic masks.

Sometime in the mid 70's, computers and optical printers got cheap and good enough so you could actually design the lines and layers on a COMPUTER SCREEN. Sales of red tape went way down. Nobody missed the red-tape days.

Nowdays just about everything is computerized in this process. THere's never a plastic sheet or tape or paper stage-- the bit images go directly form the design mprogram to the foundry.

But they still say "The design got "taped out"."

Quad core "efficient"?

[martinbogo]

It took AMD a very long time to create a low-wattage version of the dual core 280. With four cores burning away on the new chip, I wonder how efficient putting a quad-core chip on a server board will be. Right now, most servers are running more than 80W per chip, making for a massive thermal dissipation problem. There's a lot of heat to shunt away from the chip, after all.

I'd rather have an ultra-efficient dual core chip, sayyyy .. 25W .. over having a quad core monster at over 140W!

Re:Quad core "efficient"?

[thebdj]

It is called the 65nm process. While these might not be running the 65nm yet (the information seems vague but leans to it still being a 90), by the time the quad cores reach desktops, I would suspect 65nm will be a lot more common, and should help considerably in improving the power consumption. (This is part of what helped Intel keep their CPUs under control for a while.)

Re:Quad core "efficient"?

[Gr8Apes]

Inside the linked stories, they mention how Deerfield (the 65nm process chips) have dropped from the roadmap. They extrapolate that to mean that these will be the only 65nm chips.

Another decrease in power consumption can be obtained by lowering voltages, which I understood from another article to be handled on K8L by introduction of another new tech - but I don't have that link at the moment.

And lastly, it's not just pure power consumption you're worried about these days, but power consumption per computational unit. What do I care if a 4 way processor consumes twice as much power as a 2 way processor, if it can do 8 times the work? That's still a halving of power consumption in my book.

Re:Quad core "efficient"?

[InsaneGeek]

Most of the datacenters around here lease gear, and the normal span is 3 years. So every three years you replace the gear. We have some crusty/musty things on our datacenter floor that were purchased, and because of that we now have to ebay parts for 10 year old DEC VMS boxes. The cost to maintain equipment after the third year goes up significantly, often support contracts from vendors skyrocket to where it doesn't make business sense to continue using that old gear anymore.

Re:Taped out?

[Chris Burke]

The plans themselves being the masks used to create the various layers in the silicon. These mask sets were in times past designed by placing colored pieces of tape onto paper. I'm not certain, but I think the term "tape out" actually refers to those bygone days of literally "taping out" the mask set.

Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !!

[Eric Smith]

The next step after using mylar and rubylith was using CAD, and sending a nine-track magnetic tape of the data to the foundry. So "tapeout" came to mean writing the final magnetic tape.

Nowdays, of course, the data is usually transferred over the internet, so no tape of any kind is involved (not even duct tape). But it is still called tapeout for historical reasons.

In other news...

[djcinsb]

Citing similarities between blade counts in razors and processor counts in servers, Gillette began acquiring shares of AMD in a hostile takeover bid.

Re:Taped out?

[stevesliva]

Does it have something to do with the design being finalized, or the manufacturing facility being prepared to start making them (like a game "going gold")?

Generally it would mean that the physical design data has been released, allowing the creation of masks. (Masks being the "stencil" of each design layer used for lithography) Once the masks for the first design layers are prepared, manufacturing can begin.

Tapeout, a.k.a. RIT (Release-In-Tape) is just an old term, similiar to RTM (Release to Manufacturing), which is becoming obselete for software. It seems that semiconductor design terminology has a much longer life than the chips-- we still call design rule checking programs, "DRC decks." Why a "deck?" Remember punch cards? Speaking of cards, that's a netlist.

My favorite's "kerf," the area between chips on a wafer that is lost when they're diced. The term was borrowed from sawmills.

But remember, the Free Lunch is over!

[jeswin]

Wonder how long it will take for compilers and languages to catch up with the concurrency challenges. Till then, applications will run slower than ever.

[On the desktop, multimedia players, browsers, compilers, IDEs, how many of them will use those cores? Servers seem to be ready though.]

So when did AMD get bought out by Schick?

[Pluvius]

And when will Gillette-Intel come out with its five-core Fusion system with the patented "Serving Surface" for a close and comfortable network solution?

Rob

Buy for tomorrow

[spyrochaete]

In fact, all AM3 chips will be socket compatible with AM2 motherboards

This is precisely why I recently purchased an Athlon 64 X2 instead of a Core Duo despite glowing reviews of the latter. The Duo is on Intel's ancient 478/775 sockets whereas X2 is on AMD's new AM2 socket. How many more processors can Intel jimmy into those tight little PGAs? AM2 will have legs for years to come while early adopters of Duo will be buying new motherboards with their next CPU upgrades.

Re:Buy for tomorrow

[Peter La Casse]

#include "how-often-do-you-upgrade-just-your-cpu.h"

Re:Buy for tomorrow

[xenocide2]

Was this nugget of insight any less valid reguarding the now defunct 939 slot, or the soon to be released AM3 slot?

Re:Taped out?

[Chris Burke]

I've gotten conflicting answers from people in industry, often seemingly related to how old they are (and thus whether they'd have been around for the actual-tape-mask phase), which is why I said I wasn't sure. Since "tape out" with magnetic tape would still be somewhat of a euphamism whereas "tape out" with real tape is literal, I'm still not convinced it refers to magnetic tape.

Re:Taped out?

[JesseL]

I don't think that magnetic tape was involved in the original process at all. As Chris Burke said, the masks were layed out with colered tape on a drafting table. When they were completed they were photographicaly reduced to the size needed to be transfered to silicon for etching. My father used to design printed circuit boards the same way.

Java

[Gr8Apes]

Write your code in Java. Concurrency utilities are built right into 1.5 on up. With these processors, it should no longer be an issue...

Now I know I just lost any karma this story might have gained me.... ;)

Re:Taped out?

[chewedtoothpick]

Having designed a couple consumer devices where we had to burn silicon, I can say the grandparent post is the correct one. "Taping Out" is a referance to the stamp having been successfully created. This used to be accomplished by using lenghts of electrical tape on sheets of glass, but the templates I have taped-out (and I assume the rest of modern templates) are done by silk-screening the pathways directly onto high-temp plexiglass.

Next node

[TopSpin]

Wake me up when AMD has 65 nm scale cores. The vast majority of Dou Core 2 Duo Conroe Core whatever performance and efficiency gains are due to the differences between 90 and 65 nm features. Smaller scale means more execution units and more sophisticated cache logic on the same die. Until AMD does 65 nm their products will be either too hot or too slow.

We've been at 90 nm for so long people almost forgot what a massive improvement a smaller node size can make. Various AMD 65 nm engineering samples are floating around Asia and AMD has made announcements about various 65 nm models appearing Q4 06, early 2007. This is the real battle. However, no mention of what these quad-core parts are supposed to be using...

How Many Cores is too Many?

[EricBoyd]

Honestly, can you use 4 cores in any of your current applications? I think the time is coming when the 30 year trend in faster CPUs will end. If you can't increase the mega-herts, and extra cores don't actually improve application performance, what will Intel and AMD do to keep improving their products? I wrote an essay with some possible ideas: Computers in 2020

Re:How Many Cores is too Many?

[Raging Bool]

Actually, yes. Four cores would do very nicely for several of the applications developed by the company I work for.

We produce real-time data acquisition and analysis systems for multi-channel data in the audio bandwidth and above. Some of our programs have several threads per channel, and on a 128-channel system I believe we have seen over 500 threads running...

Anything that can allow our software to do more real-time analysis on the captured data without compromising the low-latency display update rates demanded by our customers is great news. Admittedly our application area is not a typical case, but I'm sure we're not alone.

Re:How Many Cores is too Many?

[NerveGas]

Photoshop can max out the four cores in my dual dual-core Opteron setup. Admittedly, I don't do that often, but that's still one app which *can*, and that's just a desktop app. Most server-oriented applications, however, are designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs.

steve

Re:Taped out?

[Grave]

Rarely has a CPU gone from tape-out to production in three months. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's never happened. GPUs do it from time to time, but the thing about any new piece of highly complex silicon (especially a quad-core CPU) is that it will take time to get the process correct, even if there are no bugs or glitches in the design. GPUs, while big, are relatively simple by comparison. On average it takes 9-12 months from tapeout to retail availability, though it has been known to happen in as little as six months.

Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together.

[newt0311]

No, it isn't just you. XP home has no support for SMP whatsoever and XP pro only has SMP support for 2 cpus. if you are running XP home, it would not be very surprising to me if the OS got confused by the multiples cores and failed miserably. If you want to test the stability of th hardware, it may be a good idea to get knopix and see how stable that it, since the kernel usually has SMP support inbuilt.

PS:My knowledge in windows SMP support is fairly dated to somebody please correct me if I am wrong.

Half-Assed...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Perhaps Core 2 will have a very short reign at the top?

It's half-assed of /. summary to say the above without even a mention of Kentsfield, which will probably beat AM3 to market with 4 cores in a single package. Next time give us the whole ass.

Bzzzt. Nope.

[JayBat]

Back in the dawn of time, when dirt was new, we "taped-out" by writing GDSII to a 1/2" 9-track 1600bpi magtape.

Back before the dawn of time, when we didn't have dirt yet, we "cut rubies" (used Exacto knives and straightedges to cut Rubylith). People still use Rubylith to do fabric silkscreening and such. No colored tape on paper, not dimensionally stable and not enough contrast for camera-reduction.

-Jay-

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago COUPLE PROBS HER

[Gr8Apes]

Most people don't care if it's four cores on the die, or two dies inside the package. They both have four cores and plug into a single socket.

They won't care until one performes significantly better than the other.

o far Intel's Core 2 Duo dual cores are beating AMD64-X2 at the top of the market. It's rash of you, to say the least, that when two Intel cores are beating two AMD cores, that somehow four AMD cores will beat four Intel cores.

Conversely, it's rash of you to make TBBA's. (That's Truth by Blatant Assertion). Let me show you how that works, prior to Core 2 - It's rash of you to say the new CPU with 2 Intel cores will beat 2 AMD cores, since even a single AMD core already trounces the Pentium Dual Core CPU.

It completely ignores all relevant facts. The new AMD cores will most likely be 65nm, putting them on the same footing as Intel's new chips. The AMD quad to Intel quad can be closely compared to the previous Intel Pentium "Dual Core" - 2 slapped together cores - vs AMD's dual core on a single die. Many of the same dynamics exist, with one major difference - AMD is doing with the quad what Intel did with the Core 2 - the AMD quad is sharing 4MB of L3 cache. That's one more level than Intel's offering, btw. Intel's quad will be 2 Core 2's slapped together, sharing a single FSB. AMD doesn't have a FSB bottleneck. Anandtech's review of the Core 2 comes up just short of stating that the FSB is going to bottleneck Intel's 2P system (Woodcrest) probably, and wisely, waiting until 2P benchmarks come in. We're all waiting on those, as they will reveal much.

In any case, I am speculating and stated as much as I backed my speculation with what information has been released to date. You are free to draw your conclusions however you'd like, but do so with some basis on known facts.

Re:Taped out?

[Chr0nik]

Actually the term "kerf" is indirectly drawn from saw [i]blade[/i] manufactueres, wherin they termed the width of a blade the kerf. Mills originally called the material lost to blade width Kerf Loss which eventually just got shortened to Kerf. [br][br] The material generated of course, being saw dust. Now days, mountains of saw dust are turned into presto logs and fire starters, for as much of a return as the wood itself in some cases, sometimes more, depending on the wood, so kerf loss is a thing of the past(unless your a carpenter).[br][br] Anyway, I digress, technically the term is directly applicable to the chip industry since their blades have a kerf of their own. No borrowing necessary.

Java not the solution; UNDERSTANDING is

[mrchaotica]

If you don't fundamentally understand parallelism, Java isn't going to help you. I mean, so it's got a "synchronized" keyword. So what? You've still got to know at what granularity you want to synchronize stuff, you've still got to avoid deadlocks and race conditions, etc.

The only thing hyping Java as a magic silver bullet will do is encourage the creation of a lot of buggy threaded code.

Asymetric cores...

[Prof.Phreak]

What I'd really like is asymetric cores... something like a really power efficient simple 1Mhz core, but when needed, a more powerful 2Mhz core steps in... then a 4Mhz core, then 8Mhz core... The box can have like 32 cores, each one 2x as fast as the last... (oh, I wish!) while 99.9% of the time, you're only using the simple 1Mhz one (ie: how much cpu power does it really take to update the clock?).

(it doesn't have to start at 1Mhz... it could start at 100Mhz, jump to 500Mhz 2nd core... 1Ghz 3rd core... and 2Ghz 4th core---so an idle CPU would use very little power).

Besides, most of the time, you won't use the cores equally anyway. You'll likely run 1 "heavy" app (some game), and a few very light ones.

What about multi-threaded apps?

[IronChef]

All this multi-core stuff is great, but is software keeping pace? It's nice to multitask more quickly, but unless I am mistaken that extra core doesn't help when you are playing a 3d game.

(I read that Unreal's upcoming "Gemini" rendering engine will be multi-threaded on the PS3. Hopefully that'll mean it supports multiple procs on the PC too.)

Re:What's the big deal?

[joe_bruin]

you should really be using tar(1) for that.

Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together.

[Emetophobe]

I just built my first AMD system three months ago, I had several bugs/quirks to work out but I think my computer is running pretty stable now.

Playing a simple MIDI file thru Audigy 2 shuts down the whole computer in a minute or so

Does your motherboard have onboard sound? Is onboard sound enabled in the bios? If you use a plug-in sound card (like your Audigy), you have to disable the onboard sound in your bios. Hopefully that resolves your sound card issue, otherwise, I'd say it's either a driver issue or else the sound card needs to be reseated. If you're using windows XP 64bit, this is your most likely culprit, the 64bit drivers are horrible IMO.

Changing game's affinity to just one CPU mid-game shuts down the computer. File copying with the onboard NIC (nForce 570) shuts down the computer - Intel PCI NIC somewhat fixed this.

Have you run memtest86+ to make sure your ram is okay? Have you correctly configured all your ram timings in the bios? Bad ram or incorrect ram settings in the bios will cause instability/crashes/lockups.

Do you have the AMD dual core drivers and AMD dual core optimizer and the Microsoft Dual Core patch for Windows XP installed? With these installed I have 0 problems with any of the games I play (Warcraft3, UT2004, GTA San Andreas, Oblivion (buggy on it's own), SimCity 4, Call of Duty 2, to name a few..).

Here are my specs:

Antec Sonata II case (comes with an Antec SmartPower 2.0 450watt psu)
Athlon64 X2 3800+ (socket 939)
MSI K8N NEO4-F mobo (bios ver 1.C)
2gig Kingston DDR400
250gig Western Digital HD
A cheap $30 Audigy 2 sound card

I went with socket 939 since AM2 wasn't out yet and I avoid getting first-gen tech (wait a few revisions). Just curious, are you using the 64bit of Windows XP?

Too young to know about Tape?

[lcsjk]

A board design was nearly ready for production when the taping was completed, i.e., taped-out. The same process was used for early IC designs in the 60's and 70's. (Probably also in the late '50's, but I am too young for that.)

Back in the mid-60's people were using black crepe-paper tape (like masking tape but black and stretchy) for laying out PC boards. Being 'stretchy' allowed it to bend around corners. Large sheets of clear film were used and aligned front to back by punching a hole in the sheet corners with a 1/4 inch diameter pins to keep them lined up. Then the board pattern was taped onto the sheets of film; topside on one layer and bottomside on another. A few designs used more layers. Mostly these were 4X actual size. These taped sheets were then reduced in a photo darkroom and used to make a glass photo-mask of actual size.

However alignment remained a problem, so some company came up with the process of using red and blue plastic tape for the front and back sides of the board and these were both put on the same large piece of 4X plastic sheet. That way the front and back were always in alignment. A red or blue filter was used in the photo lab to expose only one of the colors for each layer.

The same processes were used for large IC's well into the '70s and pictures appeared on covers of various publications when the 6800, 6500, and 8085 processors hit the market. I was not in the semi-conductor industry, but I have never read any article that said a board was "taped-out" when it was put on magnetic tape for manufacturing. It was nearly always used to tell management that the physical board layout was nearly complete and ready. Sometimes the taping took weeks.

When large high-resolution computer moniters became available, the red-blue became obsolete and the board design went straight to magnet tape for the Gerber-Plotter. However, I never heard any person refer to this as being "taped-out".

Naming

[Ed Avis]

AMD will really miss an opportunity if they call the new chip anything other than Tetrathlon.

Refers to construction of photolithographic masks

[Kadin2048]

I think the phrase referred to in times past, when the design for a chip was literally made into masks for the photo-etching process by taping patterns onto plates.

Now you'd probably have to go to a museum to actually see this being done (or to somebody who was doing it as a hobby or project, which is where I've seen it), but the language has stuck.

When a design has been "taped out," it's basically ready for production; it's ready to be actually etched into the silicon and for the manufacturing process to begin.

Re:Taped out?

[owlstead]

Would not want to literally tape out one of these beasts :)

Re:4 cores - 80 cores/5U

[wtarreau]

Tyan had a 4-sockets K8 motherboard for 1U servers. You would have 16 cores/1U, which means 80 cores per 5U. Definitely better !

willy