Former AMD engineer talks about Bulldozer

X-bit Labs reports an ex-AMD engineer spoke out about some of the reasons why Bulldozer disappoints:

The reason why performance of the long-awaited Bulldozer was below expectations is not only because it was late, but because AMD had adopted design techniques that did not allow it tweak performance, according to an ex-AMD engineer.

Cliff A. Maier, an AMD engineer who left the company several years ago, the chip designer decided to abandon practice of hand-crafting various performance-critical parts of its chips and rely completely on automatic tools. While usage of tools that automatically implement certain technologies into silicon speeds up the design process, they cannot ensure maximum performance and efficiency.

Automated Design = 20% Bigger, 20% Slower
"The management decided there should be such cross-engineering [between AMD and ATI teams within the company] ,which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency. The reason DEC Alphas were always much faster than anything else is they designed each transistor by hand. Intel and AMD had always done so at least for the critical parts of the chip. That changed before I left - they started to rely on synthesis tools, automatic place and route tools, etc.," said Mr. Maier in a forum post noticed by Insideris.com web-site.

Apparently, automatically-generated designs are 20% bigger and 20% slower than hand-crafted designs, which results in increased transistor count, die space, cost and power efficiency.

"I had been in charge of our design flow in the years before I left, and I had tested these tools by asking the companies who sold them to design blocks (adders, multipliers, etc.) using their tools. I let them take as long as they wanted. They always came back to me with designs that were 20% bigger, and 20% slower than our hand-crafted designs, and which suffered from electro-migration and other problems," the former AMD engineer said.

Inefficiencies in Design?
While it is unknown whether AMD used automatic design flow tools for everything, there are certain facts that point to some inefficient pieces of design within Bulldozer. Officially, AMD claims that the Zambezi/Orochi processor consists of around 2 billion transistors, which is a very large number.

AMD publicly said that each Bulldozer dual-core CPU module with 2MB unified L2 cache contains 213 million transistors and is 30.9mm2 large. By contrast, die size of one processing engine of Llano processor (11-layer 32nm SOI, K10.5+ micro-architecture) is 9.69mm2 (without L2 cache), which indicates that AMD has succeeded in minimizing elements of its new micro-architecture so to maintain small size and production cost of the novelty.

As a result, all four CPU modules with L2 cache within Zambezi/Orochi processor consist of 852 million of transistors and take 123.6mm2 of die space. Assuming that 8MB of L3 cache (6 bits per cell) consist of 405 million of transistors, it leaves around whopping 800 million of transistors to various input/output interfaces, dual-channel DDR3 memory controller as well as various logic and routing inside the chip.

800 million of transistors - which take up a lot of die space - in an incredibly high number for various I/O, memory, logic, etc. For example, Intel's Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" quad-core chip with integrated graphics consists of 995 million.

While it cannot be confirmed, but it looks like AMD Orochi/Zambezi has several hundreds of millions of transistors that are a result of heavy reliance onto automated design tools.

The Result? Profit Drop!
As a consequence of inefficient design and relatively low performance, AMD has to sell its eight-core FX series processors (315mm2 die size) for up to $245 in 1000-unit quantities. By contrast, Intel sells hand-crafted Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" quad-core chips (216mm2 die size)  for up to $317 in 1000-unit quantities. Given the fact that both microprocessors are made using 32nm process technology [and thus have comparable per-transistor/per square mm die cost], the Intel one carries much better profit margin than AMD's microprocessor.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.