Quote Originally Posted by Chumbucket843 View Post
the thing is he does know. tape out is a significant milestone in development. after that it's fairly easy to know how things will go. it's sort of like the last piece of the puzzle. the only thing left is for glofo to ramp 32nm.
No its not. Validation is the most unpredictable part. Horrible bugs can ruin your day and they might show up at any time during the validation process.
People tend to forget this is AMD's entirely new core since like 10 years. Can you imagine all the caveats in the multithreaded front end ?
I think the TLB fiasco with K10 is still fresh in the mind of any AMD engineer ( apparently forgotten here ). You might need to respin some layers or worse, do a significant redesign. Add 6-9 months for every respin and $30-40m in costs.
It would be interesting to find out at what stepping is BD sampling to customers.