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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."
I hate it when my balls are in the air.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
To all those AMD fanboi's that cried "Why not AMD"? when Apple choose Intel, this is why.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against AMD, I like there fact there is healthy competition in the chip world. Makes for better/faster/cheaper products for us consumers.
For AMD, a bigger die per chip means fewer chips per wafer.
Which is a problem, when you can't manufacture enough to meet demand.
You don't really understand how they make chips, do you?
It costs $X to make a wafer of CPU's. The more CPU's you get from that wafer, the cheaper each CPU costs. Large CPU Dies means fewer CPU's per wafer, thus high cost per wafer. Thus, each CPU die has a higher cost to manufacture than smaller dies.
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From the News.com article: "AMD's current pickle ..."
Well, *No wonder* AMD is having problems... they should NOT be making pickles, they should be making chips!
TDz.
the consumer wins. I was an AMD fan boy for the past few years, but like a true Chicago fan, I am rooting for the other team because they are up. AMD may strike back again, maybe not, but this price war has really benefited many of us.
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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AFAIK, this has always been AMDs problem: my earliest recollection is when they bought NexGen's K6 and sold it to Compaq in the sub-$1000 segment in 1995. Since then, anytime the get a good product, they blow it on production, leaving Intel to fill the void they created.
It is where they have failed again and again and again. I can't believe they haven't learned yet.
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Thing is, Intel is already shipping 45nm chips, though 45nm CPU's won't be shipping for a while yet. It's already working on sub-45nm technology.
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It is also worse than that.
The larger the die the lower the yield.
Taken to the extremes, assume a huge die. A single defect and you lose the entire wafer.
On a super tiny 100 dies/wafer a single defect only takes out 1%.
Of course on large dies, you might have small pieces of redundancy built in (all memory has this) so you can recover from some number of defects before you have to scrap it.
But still, the larger the die, the fewer you can make at a time and the lower the yield on the ones you do churn out.
This is not a new problem for AMD. They have always had problems keeping up with demand, and they have been capacity constrained for a few years now, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
That's the dirty little secret about the semiconductor industry- success depends just as much on manufacturing ability as the features of the chip. Intel didn't just get their 300mm wafers and 65nm process overnight- they invested 10s of billions of dollars in manufacturing R&D. The result is they have unparalleled capacity and a huge technological lead over competitors with manufacturing technology. When a large OEM comes asking for 5 million units in the next quarter with a defect rate of less than 500 per million, there are very few companies that can deliver.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
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.
when I took microelectronics courses in university about 15 years ago the lower limit for our process was around 2um (if I remember correctly) and my professor several times seemed to strongly believe that the lower limit for gate length was around 0.6-0.7um for various reasons. Nowadays we're way smaller than that, and it's getting even smaller as time goes on: is there a website somewhere that details exactly which theoretical advances have been made during the past 10-15 years to enable processes to continue getting smaller?
-- the cake is a lie
Actually, it's not a problem at all. It's a good thing. If AMD were already producing 45nm chips, and they were twice the size and slower than Intel's solution, THAT would be a problem. When you are doing well enough that you are outselling your ability to produce, and you still have not yet implemented your already developed technology, you are in a very good position.
Screw that. They'll come out with 5nm, then right after I buy it, they'll announce their 900pm chip.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
News Flash poor spelling! It's grammar
It's better than Intel's Pentium problem. They simply couldn't do the math!
Q: Why did they call it a Pentium instead of 586.
A: When they booted up the first Pentium and added 100 to 486, it answered 585.32752365107239874
Have you read my journal today?
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.
Symboligy? I think the word you're looking for is "symbolism"
He lost me at "falic".
That's the traditional thing to do when demand outstrips your ability to supply.
Deleted
would you have 1 nickel?
A guilty conscience means at least you've got one.
Actually, for manufacturers, size matters in a big way.
Semiconductor manufacturing is, like with most manufacturing, an imperfect process. In general, for a given die (a die is one "chip" before it's placed in/on any kind of case) and a given manufacturing method there is going to be a manufacturing error rate that is measured in terms of errors per unit area.
These defects can stem from everything from a speck of dust getting into the system, all the way to a gas depositing process making a trace too thin (so the trace, and thus the chip, burns up during use.)
Therefore the bigger the die is the higher the likelihood that any one die will contain one of these manufacturing defects. Since a defect can occur at any point on the wafer, the less of the wafer that can be associated with any particular common point of failure (i.e. the smaller the die,) the more valuable any particular wafer can be and thus increase yield and profit of that product.
AMD used to make Pentium clones. Now, though, the AMD architecture is completely different from Intel's although they both will run the same software. The 64-bit AMD cpus seem to have fewer software faults when running Windows XP compared with the Intel P4s. This is an observation based on only a few systems and a LOT of things besides the cpu can affect that but I wonder if anyone else has noticed this (or maybe the opposite)? The comparisons between cpu architectures are always based on speed and benchmarks but not stability. Has anyone ever compared the different designs for how many GPFs they throw off, other things being equal? I was thinking maybe that's one of the reasons why the AMD systems are still selling so well, even though the new Intel Conroe is faster.
When you can't make your product fast enough for all the demand, you're not charging enough. If you charge more, you can use that to increase manufacturing capacity. I'm sure someone at AMD understands that, so maybe they were caught off guard and are backfilling orders and have decided just to not reduce the price as early as they would have.
Unfortunately, a hexagonal die is a lot harder to design, and harder to cut out of the final wafer, than a square one. The second problem is probably solvable relatively cheaply. The first is not.
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You can work out AMD's yields by how they price their parts. The ones near the pricing sweet spots are likely to be the ones they get the biggest yields of.
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Since then, anytime the get a good product, they blow it on production, leaving Intel to fill the void they created.
There's a difference between a production problem and a capacity problem, though they both result in supply failing to meet demand. A production problem is when you theoretically could manufacture enough parts to satisfy demand, but your process, technology, or chip design is flawed and is not reliable enough to meet production goals. This is especially bad when you tell your customers that they can expect so many chips, and then you fail to deliver them. A capacity problem is when you couldn't possibly produce enough chips
AMD has had plenty of production problems in the past, when their market share was low enough they've had the fab capacity to produce enough chips, but they were simply unable to. When this happens, you have to fix the design, fix the process, tweak the technology parameters, whatever to correct the problem. While this has hurt AMD quite a bit at various times, they did recover, and it didn't fundamentally limit their marketshare.
Now, AMD has reached a point where they simply have a capacity problem. Their production process and yields are very good, but their market share is such that Fab 30 is physically incapable of producing enough chips to meet demand, even if it were working perfectly and every chip on every wafer was good. Their market share is now capped. When this happens, there's only one thing you can do: Build more capacity.
AMD hasn't had this kind of problem before. They would have loved to have this problem instead of the production problems they've had in the past.
It is where they have failed again and again and again. I can't believe they haven't learned yet.
Oh, but they have. In particular, they anticipated this problem years ago and started to build Fab 36, which is about to come on line right when their capacity issues are becoming a serious limiter to their growth. Fab 36 is going to mean a lot more capacity for AMD, and let them grow their marketshare by a lot. Now they may have production problems with the new fab, but once they get those worked out they won't be having any capacity problems for a while -- and if they do, they will giddily ply investors to help them build a new fab.
P.S. speaking of investors, the point kfg was trying to make is that a capacity problem can only be solved by increasing capacity, which requires investment in a new fab. If investors fail to invest in the extra capacity, and the company hence cannot meet demand and fails, then it is the investors who are responsible. Somewhat; after all it is the company's job to seek out investors to help them build a new fab.
The enemies of Democracy are
[putting on clownish AMD fanboy hat just for fun]
"At what point does the die become defective enough that they ship it to Intel to be a Pentium IV?"
[rim-shot]
Process steps move forward every 2 years.
45nm in 2008
32nm in 2010
more generally:
0.7 * gate_length(N) in year(N) + 2
Thermal limits will hit hard in 10+ years. No exponential can go on forever.