14 DAY TRIAL // Taping out a CPU means that a company has finished the artwork for the photomask of a circuit and has sent it to manufacturing. This is the step that Advanced micro Devices reportedly claimed to have reached in its development of the Bulldozer CPU architecture during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts. This chip will be the new high-performance server and desktop architecture and is expected to debut next year. The Interlagos will be the first server line to show up.
Normally, the company only unveils certain CPUs when they start mass production or revenue shipments, but this rule isn't set in stone. Mass production of the so-named Interlagos 12-core or 16-core server chips won't begin until the first half of 2011, but the official announcement may come even later, depending on how AMD wants to act.
Interlagos is the codename for the AMD Opteron 6,000 and will be paired with the Maranello platform. According to a so-called source familiar with AMD's server plans, other versions of the Interlagos, with lower power draw or better clocks, will start being mass produced out in Q3-Q4 of 2011.
Nothing is made specifically clear, however, and mass production doesn't necessarily coincide with the official launch. This means that the multi-core chips have an equal chance of coming out in the first and second halves of next year.
AMD didn't say when exactly it taped out the processor. At present, it takes two weeks to manufacture a complex multi-layer chip, and the timing of the tape out is important for analysis. Unfortunately, the company didn't say if it submit the design to Globalfoundries in April or June. It is also a mystery whether or not samples of the Bulldozer have already made it back from manufacturing and assembly.
"In the second quarter of this year we also taped out the first 32nm product based on our new high-performance Bulldozer CPU core. We plan to begin sampling our Bulldozer based server and desktop processors in the second half of this year and remain on track for 2011 launches. These new processors will deliver significant performance improvements to the AMD platform," said Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer of AMD, during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts.