AMD Admits To Having Yield Issues
It’s hard to build credibility yet easy to lose it.
AMD faces the specter of having worked to build credibility throughout 2003 to 2006, only to see it fade before them in 2007. A lot of credibility has “drained away in the last eight months” (p. 2).
Maybe AMD should imitate Intel for the time being until AMD gets back on its feet.
Barcelona has had a long history of problems. The chip was almost a no-show as early as CeBIT. Now AMD is at long last admitting what many in the industry have been saying. The delays of the Barcelona chip were due to yield problems.
The product manager of Opteron has now explained that problems with the complexity of Barcelona “did not allow the company to deliver proper yields”. AMD was not “yielding the volumes”. And the company was having trouble “ramping up the learning curve”.
Hindsight is always 20/20. One indication that Barcelona was having yield problems was the announcement of three-core CPUs.
A three-core CPU is not a technical feat. It’s still a good idea. Rather than throw away an entire CPU die, just disable the core that is not up-to-snuff. That way, you can still make use of the whole wafer, the whole cow, so to speak. That is, rather than cut out just the fillet and prime rib of a beast, you use the whole cow.
Management steadfastly denied that Barcelona was experiencing yield issues. The process technology was fine, they said. There was an issue of marriage between process and design, whatever that means. One thing it meant is that AMD was having yield issues.
Yield issues are not the same as the TLB (Translation-Lookaside Buffer) erratum. No, they’re different. It wasn’t until after the launch of Barcelona that AMD “also ran into this erratum”.
All processors have bugs. By the time a processor ships, however, the more serious issues are supposed to be worked out.
One analyst was worried that something is wrong with the way in which AMD tests its chips. The TLB error ought to have been caught. That may be.
However, it seems that the debugging process of server chips these days is a collaborative effort between processor and server makers. This appears to be one reason processors are sampled. To help work out the bugs.
In the future AMD intends to get “chips into the hands of OEMs faster to allow for more testing and debugging”.
AMD will sample the new Barcelona chip, sans TLB bug, to server makers in Q1. From AMD server partners in Q2 of ‘08 “expect to see products”.
Read more here.