Zacate is hardly a complex core, and whether or not its rollout was smooth is, shall we say, unknown?
The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]
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Zacate is hardly a complex core, and whether or not its rollout was smooth is, shall we say, unknown?
And the story was just updated on Semiaccurate to note that Trinity is having yield problems, though allegedly not as bad as Llano's.
Bulldozer was to be the acid test of the new and improved AMD. Fusion was a wobbly start, with signs of decent demand AMD could not meet, and it's not a case of selling out of everything AMD wanted to build, it produced far fewer than it wanted.
Now we get news that even AMD's 45nm capabilities were compromised due to 32nm tool sharing.
Whatever the dwindling number of customers may say about AMD fighting the Intel monopoly bogeyman, it rapidly loses this utility if it cannot be trusted to meet its obligations or projections. What's worse for a company trying to build product, an Intel that overcharges for its chips, assuming it can do so without throttling the upgrade cycle, or an AMD that will leave you twisting in the wind when it screws up yet another product transition?
Better yet, how do they feel about an AMD whose product transitions screw up their current supply capabilities?
Now we get news that even AMD's 45nm capabilities were compromised due to 32nm tool sharing.
Whatever the dwindling number of customers may say about AMD fighting the Intel monopoly bogeyman, it rapidly loses this utility if it cannot be trusted to meet its obligations or projections. What's worse for a company trying to build product, an Intel that overcharges for its chips, assuming it can do so without throttling the upgrade cycle, or an AMD that will leave you twisting in the wind when it screws up yet another product transition?
Better yet, how do they feel about an AMD whose product transitions screw up their current supply capabilities?
GF's process is probably at fault for a lot of this. The power numbers for slightly different Llano SKUs look like they are due to variability, and that has been predicted years ago as a likely problem with gate-first.
However, it is AMD's only option for high-performance CPU silicon, so as far as the CPU market is concerned, it's all the same.
However, it is AMD's only option for high-performance CPU silicon, so as far as the CPU market is concerned, it's all the same.
Probably as much blame as Nvidia deserved for 40nm. Yield is rarely a design problem.Alexko said:
No it's not as Zacate is a different process node at a different fab.
Then again those two companies were working under one roof not that long ago.
Maybe they should blame IBM. GF and Samsung were pissy at them for a reason.
Zacate was by no means simple in an absolute sense, simpler than Llano sure but we're still talking about an extremely densely packed ~400 million transistor design w/ a brand new OoOE CPU micro-architecture w/ all the bells and whistles and a new bus architecture. Getting it to work is no mean feat, esp. when the only experience you've had w/ TSMC was fabbing GPUs which have higher tolerances than CPU/GPU combos. Anyway, there certainly wasn't as much noise about delays and full revisions as with BD / Llano.
Then again, they were both announced at the same analyst's day in '05 and are all appearing in the same year so there probably were some teething issues w/ Zacate (or maybe this is Zacate 2 we're looking at). It is also possible they pulled engineers off of Zacate to work on Llano which is why it's only appearing this year. We'll see what moves AMD makes in the future re: layouts.
Then again, they were both announced at the same analyst's day in '05 and are all appearing in the same year so there probably were some teething issues w/ Zacate (or maybe this is Zacate 2 we're looking at). It is also possible they pulled engineers off of Zacate to work on Llano which is why it's only appearing this year. We'll see what moves AMD makes in the future re: layouts.
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That's the part that's truly inexcusable; they doubled down and lost their house. Atleast they had the sense to outsource some work to TSMC, a definite benefit of the new fab-lite AMD.
It is weird I was really annoyed AMD bought ATI back in the day b/c I thought it would kill off Nvidia and graphics competition. Now it looks like AMD is just trying to kill themselves and ATI may be all that is holding them above water. The best case for me would be AMD has to sell off ATI to stay afloat and then manages to make a decent CPU as well so we have competition all around again 
Really? Thanks for the info, but OUCH!
I've had that dream before too.
If everybody would just send AMD a check for $1 when you buy your next Intel CPU it may save us money in the long run.
ROFL. That would ease my conscience seriously
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