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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.'"
Per TFA, "completion of the design". I was also confused by this phrase in the summary.
Ben Hocking
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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...
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.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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.
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Its probably when they tap the chip assembly tray out so they fall to the counter. Just like muffins.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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"."
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.
.. 25W .. over having a quad core monster at over 140W!
I'd rather have an ultra-efficient dual core chip, sayyyy
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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.
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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.
Citing similarities between blade counts in razors and processor counts in servers, Gillette began acquiring shares of AMD in a hostile takeover bid.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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.
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.
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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-
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.
... what did you expect, something profound?
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
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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".
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.
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