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For AMD Success Means Problems
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's success with its dual-core Opteron and Athlon processors has created something of a happy problem for the company. It can't make its products fast enough to meet demand. Just the same, with the Intel price war heating up and new 65-nanometer manufacturing technology being implemented in its factories, AMD has a lot of balls in the air right now." From the News.com article: "AMD's current pickle is the result of its success, which makes it a little easier to swallow for company executives. Demand is high, but the company's dual-core processors still use its 90-nanometer manufacturing technology. Intel's chips, on the other hand, are built using the smaller transistors provided by its 65-nanometer manufacturing technology. Not only is AMD using larger transistors, but its dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 processors contain two processing cores integrated onto a single piece of silicon, or a die. This design has given AMD great performance during the past few years, but resulted in processors that were almost twice the size of its single-core chips."
2. Larger size = higher average chance of defect per die
3. Larger size = more expensive to manufacture per processor
So you see, size DOES matter :)
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It means more than that...
First, you are correct. If you get more chips per wafer, you can make more chips. Since the time to process 1 wafer remains consant. However, there is also more going on.
The second thing to worry about is the cost. If it costs (making up numbers) $100 to process a wafer and you get 10 chips, it is $10 to manufacture 1 chip. If you get 20 chips from the wafer, then it only costs $5 to manufacture 1 chip.
The third item is quality control. If there are any flaws in the wafer, the chip that is created over that flaw can not be used. So that chip gets thrown out. If we can get more chips from a single wafer, our percentage yield increases as well. Imagine that there is 1 flaw per wafer. If we only get 1 chip per wafer our actual yield is 0%. This would be very bad. Now imagine we get 2 chips per wafer. While it is possible that the flaw would affect both chips, most likely it will only affect 1, giving a yield of 50%. If you get 3 chips, your yield is 66%. This yield really hits the bottom line.
If you are losing 2-3 chips per wafer from flaws, then any increase in the number of chips is going to increase your yield percentage. If you call it a 25% increase in chips on a wafer, due to the 65nm instead of 90nm process, the percentage of chips lost to flaws will also go down and you just made more money.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
AMD is converting Fab 30 in Dresden from 90um and 200mm wafers to Fab 38, with 65nm and 300mm wafers. This should come on line in 2007. Longer term, AMD is building a new fab in upstate New York for 32nm features on 300mm wafers. That should come on line in 2010.
Meanwhile, AMD's main fab, Fab 36 in Dresden, is starting to produce 65nm features on 200mm wafers. AMD is also outsourcing some production to a 65nm fab in Singapore.
Down at the user level, this means that first shipments of AMD CPUs made with 65nm technology should appear in December of 2006. Coming soon to Dell Dimension desktops.