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.'"

Completion of the design

[benhocking]

Per TFA, "completion of the design". I was also confused by this phrase in the summary.

Re:Taped out?

[ZPWeeks]

Tapeout is basically when the processor design process is completed and the final plans are written down to be sent and manufactured. They call it "taping out" because they used to write the specification data to magnetic tape.

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.

Re:I'm not a chip guy

[Diss Champ]

Tapeout is when the designers are finished with deciding where all the transistors and such are on the chip (layout), and the layout data files are sent over to the mask-maker to be changed to the masks (basically things you shine light, xrays, whatever through in order to put those designs on the chips during fabrication). Long long ago, actual tape was used for masks.

Re:Software Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Oracle, a "software company", already licenses according to the number of cores you have [oracle.com].

Re:Taped out?

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Quad core "efficient"?

[thebdj]

It is called the 65nm process. While these might not be running the 65nm yet (the information seems vague but leans to it still being a 90), by the time the quad cores reach desktops, I would suspect 65nm will be a lot more common, and should help considerably in improving the power consumption. (This is part of what helped Intel keep their CPUs under control for a while.)

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?

[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:Software Licensing

[Amouth]

Back in the day the number of CPU's ment the number of threads that could be proccessed meaning the amount of work that could be done.. In essence One nice 4 CPU server could do the work of 4 smaller severs, software writers realized that if the licensed it per computer that large companies would buy once license and run it on a big box and not on several smaller boxes and get the same work done but with the software company not getting as much money.. so they made it so that you have do pay per cpu OR pay a whole lot for one server no matter the number of cpu's

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..

Java

[Gr8Apes]

Write your code in Java. Concurrency utilities are built right into 1.5 on up. With these processors, it should no longer be an issue...

Now I know I just lost any karma this story might have gained me.... ;)

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:Software Licensing

[Amouth]

it is limited to the number of physical cpu's not cores or thread paths..

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:Taped out?

[Grave]

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.

Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together.

[newt0311]

No, it isn't just you. XP home has no support for SMP whatsoever and XP pro only has SMP support for 2 cpus. if you are running XP home, it would not be very surprising to me if the OS got confused by the multiples cores and failed miserably. If you want to test the stability of th hardware, it may be a good idea to get knopix and see how stable that it, since the kernel usually has SMP support inbuilt.

PS:My knowledge in windows SMP support is fairly dated to somebody please correct me if I am wrong.

Half-Assed...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Perhaps Core 2 will have a very short reign at the top?

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.

Re:Four Cores and Seven Years Ago

[smoker2]

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.

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 respond or lose out - ie tennis.

sorry for the nag, but use it or lose it.

Re:Taped out?

[Chr0nik]

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.

Re:What's the big deal?

[joe_bruin]

you should really be using tar(1) for that.

Re:Yeah, OK. Microsoft, get your act together.

[Emetophobe]

I just built my first AMD system three months ago, I had several bugs/quirks to work out but I think my computer is running pretty stable now.

Playing a simple MIDI file thru Audigy 2 shuts down the whole computer in a minute or so

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 else the sound card needs to be reseated. If you're using windows XP 64bit, this is your most likely culprit, the 64bit drivers are horrible IMO.

Changing game's affinity to just one CPU mid-game shuts down the computer. File copying with the onboard NIC (nForce 570) shuts down the computer - Intel PCI NIC somewhat fixed this.

Have you run memtest86+ to make sure your ram is okay? Have you correctly configured all your ram timings in the bios? Bad ram or incorrect ram settings in the bios will cause instability/crashes/lockups.

Do you have the AMD dual core drivers and AMD dual core optimizer and the Microsoft Dual Core patch for Windows XP installed? With these installed I have 0 problems with any of the games I play (Warcraft3, UT2004, GTA San Andreas, Oblivion (buggy on it's own), SimCity 4, Call of Duty 2, to name a few..).

Here are my specs:

Antec Sonata II case (comes with an Antec SmartPower 2.0 450watt psu)
Athlon64 X2 3800+ (socket 939)
MSI K8N NEO4-F mobo (bios ver 1.C)
2gig Kingston DDR400
250gig Western Digital HD
A cheap $30 Audigy 2 sound card

I went with socket 939 since AM2 wasn't out yet and I avoid getting first-gen tech (wait a few revisions). Just curious, are you using the 64bit of Windows XP?

Too young to know about Tape?

[lcsjk]

A board design was nearly ready for production when the taping was completed, i.e., taped-out. The same process was used for early IC designs in the 60's and 70's. (Probably also in the late '50's, but I am too young for that.)

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".

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.