TG Daily On The Road – Last week had an opportunity to visit AMD’s former ATI headquarter outside Toronto to get some information on new products we aren’t allowed to talk about just yet. What we can talk about, however, are ATIs AMDs validation labs. We did a similar report on this a while ago for Intel, and even if this is just the place where AMD develops chipsets and graphics cards, it shows just how different the two companies are in size.

When you buy a computer you can be certain that its hardware has a history of stress testing, which is usually referred to as validation. The purpose of validation is to unveil potential bugs in the design of products and prep, in this case, semiconductors for mass-production. The goal, of course, is that you get a functional chip for the PC in your office and your home.  

Every CPU has bugs, some of the serious, some of them not. They are corrected throughout a chip’s lifecycle and are documented in so-called errata. Validation processes have become more visible since the Intel’s 1994 Pentium FDIV bug, probably the best known and most serious bug caught in processors in modern times. More recently, you may have heard about a bug in AMD’s Barcelona processor that has been making headlines and cost AMD billions of dollars in market capitalization. As the cost of the development and production of a processor goes up, validation becomes a more and more important link the development chain.

Granted, the Markham labs represent only a fraction of AMD’s global validation team. Still, we believe that a look behind its doors provides interesting insight in the firm’s effort to test and fix chips that are still in development and yet to be released to the market. There are several stages in this validation chain and we’ll describe a few of the most interesting ones (well, and the ones that AMD was willing to show us) in this article.


Prototyping

Intel and AMD are different companies with different resources. While Intel employs more than 3000 people around the globe in validation jobs, AMD has about 400. 30 of those are working in a “prototyping” hall, which, well, has the purpose of providing sample numbers of motherboards with chipsets and graphics cards. This stage in the developing is, by the way, also vastly different from Nvidia’s fab-less approach, which in fact does not produce physical prototypes. Instead, Nvidia simulates the hardware design in a little-known, but massive supercomputer installation located at its Santa Clara headquarters. Nvidia’s first silicon of a new chip is the actual chip that goes into the market.

However, prototyping is critical to AMD’s graphics unit and unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any pictures of this stage. We estimate the size of the hall at about 50 x 25 yards, slightly smaller than one quarter of a football field. There are three production lines with the capability of manufacturing three different boards at the same time. There are is not one of those super-clean, dust free environments you see in pictures, but leaves a surprisingly plain impression. But then AMD does not manufacturer actually silicon here, but simply integrates components, such as GPUs (which are manufactured in Taiwan), and connectors onto boards. Only about half of the production stations are automated and we saw about ten stations in each line that required ATI engineers to manually work on a board.

Production runs in two shifts or 16 hours per day, employing about 100 people. We were told that, several years ago, this facility actually served as an-onsite production line for ATI graphics cards. Today, the installation serves for prototyping only, meaning that most of the products created remain in house for testing and others being shipped to partners, journalists and analysts for evaluation purposes. The production capacity is about 4000 boards per month.

It isn’t hard to guess that a graphics board takes significant time from entering the production line to leaving it. AMD staff told us that it takes “less than a day” to complete a board, which shows just how complex, time-consuming and expensive the prototyping process is. We were told that the actual production cost of a prototype high-end graphics card (which sells for about $400 when in mass production) is somewhere between $2000 and $3000.

Typically, several hundred prototypes are produced, but actually never reach the market. Most of the cards remain in-house and go into validation and stress-testing. A portion of the batch is sent to partners, journalists and analysts for review.

Read on the next page: Validation and driver testing