Demo of AMD's Barcelona points the way downhill
A lot more than you think
By Charlie Demerjian: dimanche 03 décembre 2006, 15:43
AMD'S demo of Barcelona on Thursday told us a lot more than you might think, and none of it looks good.
OK, I lied, the demo of a working quad core part does look good, but it is downhill from there. If you recall, AMD laid the gauntlet down 'demo before the end of the year', and it did indeed do so with a full month to spare, so mad props to the peeps in AMD engineering or somesuch.
A couple more data points to keep in the back of your head, AMD showed off wafers of Barcelona at the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit - cool event, but unless you like supply chains, avoid it - on September 29. I was told it had chips up and running, and the wafer pictured was not the only one.
Backtracking a little, wafers take around 12 weeks to wiggle their way through a fab and get from shiny blank disk to shiny patterned disk chopped up into expensive rectangles and stuck to a piece of fibre glass. In the process, they pick up more frequent flier miles than I got last year, so you're talking a lot. If you 'hot lot' this process, basically giving them priority at every step of the chain, you can shave two or so weeks off. Let's just say that from tape out to chips, counting travel time, you are at three months.
That puts the tape out of Barcelona at the end of June if one presumes the AMDers didn't tape it out, get blindingly drunk, and forget about it for a few weeks while the hangover subsided.We first got word in August, one story short of the magic 33700 mark and something that is not a coincidence, but it had to have happened about two months before that.
It then got another stepping back about a month ago, let's say October 29 to make the numbers easier. Backtracking 10 weeks says these changes went into the oven in the middle of August. I am not enough of a chips designer to know how many bugs you can work out without silicon to physically test, or why it would make sense to do the first rev if you knew of bugs, but this is what the data shows.
If it put another batch in the oven, which it undoubtedly did, it had to have been after the middle of October because it would have to get A2 silicon in September and late October A1 parts back before the end of the year. In fact there are other reasons why it would have had to have it in the oven before mid-October, the main one is the Chrismakwanzakuah holidays, you lose a few weeks there. An analyst demo does not do much good if NY City is empty of said folk, they are probably in a place where the spit does not freeze on the sidewalk.
Basically, AMD set a deadline of 'before the end of the year' and was then stuck with A1 silicon, good, bad or ugly. This is why you get a demo of task manager, and the press aren't even allowed close enough to play minesweeper. On the other hand, AMD got it to boot Windows, and that is no small task.
If you want to play devil's advocate, Intel showed Tigertown running at speed over a month ago. This is a patently unfair comparison because Tigertown is a Conroe x 2 with a new chipset, a very different proposition from a new CPU. Still, that chip is what AMD will be up against in the market so it may not be technically correct, but you don't buy tech, you buy products. Intel let a bunch of hyperactive monkeys that masquerade as press beat a system at will vs running task manager with a stick wielding goon ready to break fingers should you touch. Again, patently unfair but still, that's the way the Chipzilla cookie crumbles.
What it boils down to is that AMD had an internal time table that it planned to meet. You can be pretty sure that AMD was not planning six months out to run task manager in order to awe a group of industry analysts. It was planning on being far ahead of where it is now, and possibly running Solitaire or something else useful.
It didn't happen, so I think Barcelona silicon is behind where it hoped it would be. This does not necessarily translate into a schedule slip, but it sure doesn't add a positive spin. Add in the change in rhetoric from Q2 to mid-07 and you have one hell of a conspiracy, or at least a convergence of messiness.
To toss in a positive tidbit, I hear the AMD 65 nanometre process is coming out on the upper end of its expectations. This may not translate into earlier releases of parts, but it does bode a little better. So, with a single demo, AMD did what it said and signalled a lot more, most of it not terribly good. µ
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