AMD Announces Quad Core Tape-Out 347
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.'"
Taped out? (Score:2)
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")?
Completion of the design (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Completion of the design (Score:2)
I guess if you weren't up to speed on which manufacturers were using which process, it'd be confusing.
Poor grammar (Score:2)
Refers to construction of photolithographic masks (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Taped out? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Taped out? (Score:2)
Re:Taped out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Taped out? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Taped out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Taped out? (Score:5, Informative)
Bzzzt. Nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [ehow.com] to do fabric silkscreening and such. No colored tape on paper, not dimensionally stable and not enough contrast for camera-reduction.
-Jay-
Re:Taped out? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Taped out? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Taped out? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Taped out? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Taped out? (Score:3, Informative)
Software Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Software Licensing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Software Licensing (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
here is a very interesting article on the subject of product pricing.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandR
Re:Software Licensing (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Software Licensing (Score:2)
Re:Software Licensing (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Software Licensing (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
AMD++ (Score:5, Interesting)
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++ (Score:3, Interesting)
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 outsid
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
"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...
Yes, but very few people buy Opterons for the desktop market. I'm sure that a good number get sold for the "workstation" market (CAD, rendering, etc.), but not as desktops.
The real strength of the Opterons has been in DBMS servers, where the massive memory bandwidth from having 2, 4, or 8 memory controllers has reall
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
How can you take a Slashdot post seriously when the writer can't properly punctuate a question (ignoring jokes that "you can't take one seriously anyway," of course)?
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
How can you take a Slashdot post seriously...
If you don't see the difference between a punctuation error in a casual, unedited post and failing to properly spell the main subject of the article you have written, when you're a professional writer, then I think you're missing the point. I don't expect posts here or even summaries from the editors to be correct or proper. I don't expect the articles themselves to have perfect spelling. I do expect them to at least know how to pluralize the main topic. It's
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Yes, in the semiconductor industry (and in Vegas), 'dice' is by far the most common plural form of 'die.'
For a die used in gambling, both dies and dice are proper pluralization. For a die used in manufacturing, only "dies" is proper. They are two different words that happen to be spelled the same. I don't care if a technician misuses one as slang, but a professional writer who does so loses more than a little credibility. It's the subject of the article, not some incidental aspect.
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Will AMD actually do shared L2 in their new processors? I have not heard it stated yet at least.
Which makes things more interesting still; AMD has a better interconnect for all their four cores in the form of very local HyperTransport, but Intel has a far better interconnect within the pairs (shared L2) but a worse interconnect between the pairs (the FSB, which is not that shabby, but still no HyperTransport).
Will be fun to see at any rate, if nothing else it would be rather interesting if Apple announc
Re:AMD++ (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the AM2 chips appear to be for single CPU boards only, Socket F is the new Opteron socket. But, the way I'm going, just to be able to drop in a new quad CPU will meet my needs in a year or two for the next couple of years, at least. (I don
Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Flamebait)
The AMD grasp to hang on was the 4x4 socket, which is an interesting idea if nothing else. I really think you should read up
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2)
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2)
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2)
The difference from last time when Intel did this packaging move, is that intel was starting out with inferior cores and its loss was assured. This time Intel has the superior core and that will swamp the very small packaging differences.
But I dont' really care. I am just looking for this move to lower prices on dual cores. M
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:3, Informative)
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 resp
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2)
So, packing more cores onto a chip allows you to fill your die with working transistors, and doesn't cost you billions in R&D.
Interestingly enough, Intel
Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago (Score:2)
Intel's basically screwe
4 cores? (Score:2)
That means I can get a 32-way system in that Tyan 5U case.
That's just friggin' ludicrous.
IIRC, 32-cores is the limit for the current generation of Hypertransport. I think it has a 6-bit address and half of them are reserved for memory controllers. And that doesn't include I/O MCPs. So the practical limit is 28 (7x4).
tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:5, Interesting)
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"."
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:2)
So, since it's over the internet, I guess these days you could say it was "tubed out"?
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:2)
It's no unusual at all for for 'heritage' terminology to survive past the technology or system that inspired it - because the understanding of the term is still widely held.
For example - the 'Christmas Tree', the section of a submarines ballast control panel tha
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:2)
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:2)
also consider the adage: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded up with backup tapes.
Re:tee hee! "Taped out" !! (Score:2)
Quad core "efficient"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather have an ultra-efficient dual core chip, sayyyy
Re:Quad core "efficient"? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Quad core "efficient"? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 computati
Re:Quad core "efficient"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quad core "efficient"? (Score:2)
4 cores (Score:2)
This will happen 4 times before they plan to do a recall, thus the name "quad core".
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
But remember, the Free Lunch is over! (Score:2, Insightful)
[On the desktop, multimedia players, browsers, compilers, IDEs, how many of them will use those cores? Servers seem to be ready though.]
Java (Score:2, Informative)
Now I know I just lost any karma this story might have gained me....
Java not the solution; UNDERSTANDING is (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:But remember, the Free Lunch is over! (Score:2)
Think about how many tasks are running on a standard desktop just when you are surfing the net. You have the GUI, TCP/IP stack, and the browser. That is three threads at a minimum. And yes I know that I have way simplified it. Most PCs and servers have dozens of tasks, processes, and or threads running at any one time.
Yes dual or quad cores are close to useless if you are running dos but for most use
Re:But remember, the Free Lunch is over! (Score:2)
Re:But remember, the Free Lunch is over! (Score:2)
More and more cores means that exisitng langugages are less and less efficient. You want to control task distribution on a 32 core machine? What ha
So when did AMD get bought out by Schick? (Score:5, Funny)
Rob
Buy for tomorrow (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Buy for tomorrow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Buy for tomorrow (Score:2)
DDR2 provides miniscule improvements over DDR, but it is less expensive. FB-DIMM for the next few years will be much like RAMBUS, too expensive for a ne
Next node (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
I should resist it but I can't.... (Score:2)
How Many Cores is too Many? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How Many Cores is too Many? (Score:2)
Poor Heinrich.
Yes, the megahertz wars have flattened for the time being. Now compiler are going to be perfected for multicore developmen, and some new ways to use Multi-processor will emerge.
Then we will hit some limit to the max cores, and speed will be the name of the game once again.
At this point, I think we wuld be better off if computers couldn't get faster until some break though 10-12 years from now. Code optimization would come back in a mean wa
Re:How Many Cores is too Many? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 de
Re:How Many Cores is too Many? (Score:5, Insightful)
steve
Half-Assed... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Asymetric cores... (Score:3, Interesting)
(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? (Score:3, Insightful)
(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.)
Too young to know about Tape? (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm not a chip guy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I'm not a chip guy (Score:2)
Re:Good job AMD (Score:2)
o.O
Re:Compatability *mutter* (Score:2)
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.ph
Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together. (Score:2, Informative)
PS:My knowledge in windows SMP support is fairly dated to somebody please correct me if I am wrong.
Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together. (Score:3, Informative)
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 el
Re:Naming terminology (Score:2)
Re:Short Reign? (Score:2)
AMD can do no wrong, and anything from Intel is not nearly as good as something from AMD, even if AMD won't be making it for 2 years.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:3, Informative)