I really don't know about gen 4's tape-out. It would be a truly amazing thing, that's for certain, but I don't think that gen 4 is as that stage already. Where did we get those information from, after all? Who gave us those information?
Here's what we know from FC about gen 4:
6) What is the progress on gen4?
It is 28nm and has two major improvements: the first one is to fix the design errors we had with 40nm (which made our silicon data two times worse than simulated data). We believe that 0.35W/G at rated speed of 400MHz would be achievable in 40nm if no mistakes were made before. The second one is the technology improvement from 40nm to 28nm in terms of density, speed and power.
We are on the stage of evaluating the final design choices by running the physical design flow on different settings.
4) The next gen chips, BE300, are likely to be compatible with BE200 with respect to pinouts and package. Therefore all efforts on BE200 based designs are always useful in the long term.
And here's some translated info from the salon:
"Sales team committed to improving the situation of information dissemination. Will be more open."
"Prices are 3xxxx, count force> 1t. My god."
"be300 conservative says the year. May advance."
"Calculate the force said the average rate for the year is 15-20% of the whole network. This is the goal"
"I hope to resume dividend in August."
"Invoices, haha" - wat?
And then we had this rumour:
I heard that the 28nm chip will tape-out in 8 days.
A tape-out some time in the next month doesn't seem that unreasonable to me and it pretty much needs to be within the next 2 months for AM to have any chance of producing gen 4 hardware this year.