AMD Tapes Out First "Bulldozer" Microprocessors

Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest supplier of microprocessors, said that it had taped out the first central processing units (CPUs) based on the code-named Bulldozer core. The company hopes to begin sampling of the chips with customers shortly and initiate mass production sometimes in 2011.

"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 community.

The "tape out" means that the artwork for the photomask of a circuit is sent to manufacturing. It is unclear at this point whether AMD has already received samples of the Bulldozer processors back from manufacturing and assembling or at least manufactured wafers from Globalfoundries. Moreover, it is uncertain when exactly AMD submit the design of the chip to its foundry partner: back in April, or back in June? At present it takes weeks to manufacture a complex multi-layer chip, so, the timing of the tape out is really important for analysis.