The company is concentrating on making its chips smaller and cheaper to manufacture

Sep 2, 2012 13:41 GMT  ·  By

AMD has decided to concentrate on the bulk manufacturing process instead of the usual Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) that has been the company’s main technology for the past eleven years.

Back in 2001, AMD’s Palomino processors, or the famous AthlonXP as most of us know them, were imbued with IBM’s SOI technology to help achieve higher working frequencies by lowering the amount of current leakage and power consumption.

When designing a high frequency microprocessor, the architect is not really concentrating on lowering the power consumption.

Some of the internal units that are getting very hot when heavily in use could pose a problem to the chip’s overall stability and ability to function.

Therefore, the designers usually take the decision to move their position to a somewhat “cooler” area of the chip.

When designing a microchip with tens of millions – or even billions – of transistors, moving around some of the functional units might make the overall die size of the chip a whole lot bigger.

Back when Intel and AMD were fighting head to head for the absolute performance crown, some concessions about the die size and power consumption were made.

Basically, the companies thought it was alright to have a 140-watt CPU TDP if that was what it took to win the benchmarks. The same goes for a 10% to 20% bigger die size.

This was back in the days when AMD has its own foundries and all the costs were managed by the company itself, but now that AMD is paying TSMC or GlobalFoundries to manufacture their designs, the bigger die size would come with a significant increase in costs per chip.

Now, the company is working with different foundries that are mostly using bulk manufacturing process and have various chip design tools at their disposal and it believes all this diversity comes with impressive potential.

Read all about these impressive AMD simulations and potential improvements in Part 2 of our AMD report that's coming later this week.

AMD Experiments with Different CPU Design Methods – Part 2.