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.

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

[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: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.

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

[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:Taped out?

[crabpeople]

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

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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

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.