We Have AMD's Top-Secret 'Stardust' System _ Tear-Down & Hands-On
**Unveiling AMD's "Stardust": A Comprehensive Look at Top-Secret Test Equipment**
In the world of hardware testing and development, few tools are as enigmatic and crucial as AMD's "Stardust" test equipment. This top-secret apparatus, designed for validating motherboards and coolers before CPUs reach the market, is incredibly rare to find in the wild. The following article delves into the details of this fascinating piece of hardware, exploring its components, functionality, and historical significance.
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### **Introduction to AMD's Stardust Test Equipment**
Stardust, a code name shrouded in mystery until now, represents a sophisticated line of test equipment used by AMD for rigorous validation of their large-socket CPUs, including Threadripper and Epic series processors. These units were developed as early as 2016 but have only recently come to light due to the efforts of hardware enthusiasts.
The video highlights the rarity of such equipment, which is designed to roam and hide from curious individuals like us. The system consists of multiple modules, load pods, and attachments, making it a valuable provenance piece for AMD enthusiasts while offering insights into how the industry designs products for silicon that doesn't yet exist.
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### **The Components of the Stardust System**
On the table today, we have three main modules, two identical units for DDR3 DIMMs, and several load pods. The primary module is an "SDLE2_SP3_ALM" (Static Dynamic Load Emulator), which serves as a dummy load to simulate CPU power consumption. This unit was last calibrated in 2016, just before the release of Threadripper.
The SDLE2_SP3_ALM features a full pin-out for what eventually became Threadripper or first-generation Epic CPUs. On one side, it has a distribution plate that functions as an integrated heat spreader (IHS) stand-in, allowing for initial dummy heater testing for cooler designs. The other side is connected to memory modules via ribbon cables, showcasing the modular design of the system.
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### **Functionality and Purpose**
Stardust's primary function is to apply a controlled load to power rails at a set current, enabling precise monitoring and adjustment of voltage and current values. The system supports up to four power rails, with the option to expand to eight by pairing additional modules. This capability makes it invaluable for testing motherboard VRM (voltage regulator module) performance and ensuring accurate power reporting.
The video mentions that static dynamic load emulators like Stardust allow partners to start designing their products before the actual CPU is finalized, streamlining the development process.
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### **Historical Context and Development**
The journey of acquiring this rare equipment began years ago when hardware enthusiasts spotted listings for "AMD load generators" and "emulators." These units were purchased from auctions, with one clear example being an AMD SP3 socket chip used for generating loads during testing.
The significance of such tools was highlighted by the inaccuracies in power reporting metrics, a problem that led to the development of hardware info 64's "power reporting deviation" feature. This tool helped motherboard manufacturers understand the importance of accurate telemetry reference current (TRC) values, which are determined using dummy loads like Stardust.
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### **Technical Details and Usage**
Stardust's software interface offers dynamic and static modes for controlling power rails. In static mode, output values are displayed in two lists of eight entries each. Current values are prefixed with "i," while voltage values are prefixed with "v," reflecting the hardware configuration.
The system uses jumpers and headers to connect to load pods, which simulate CPU loads without actual silicon. This approach allows for precise monitoring of power rails and current sense outputs, ensuring that motherboards meet AMD's specifications.
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### **Challenges and Limitations**
While the system is highly advanced, there are challenges in using it effectively. The video notes that some components, such as the power supply and motherboard, are missing from the acquired units. These pieces are critical for powering the equipment and completing the testing setup.
The enthusiasts also mention that AMD likely retains many of these systems in their labs, further emphasizing the rarity of finding fully functional units outside of official channels.
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### **Conclusion**
AMD's "Stardust" test equipment represents a pinnacle of engineering, offering unparalleled insights into how hardware manufacturers validate their products before release. The system's modular design and precise load emulation capabilities make it an indispensable tool for ensuring reliable performance in high-end CPUs like Threadripper.
For enthusiasts, the acquisition of such rare equipment is not only a testament to perseverance but also a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes processes that shape our favorite hardware components. If you'd like to explore more about this and similar projects, check out [Store.Gamerzexus.net](https://store.gamerzexus.net) or subscribe to their Patreon for exclusive content.
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This article provides an in-depth exploration of AMD's "Stardust" test equipment, highlighting its significance in hardware validation and offering a detailed look at its components and functionality.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enstardust is probably one of the coolest code names we've encountered and it's attached to this top secret amd test equipment that we've managed to get a hold of these are incredibly rare to find in the wild so to speak where test equipment roams and hides from people like us so this has a few modules we're going to be looking at today these are very important for design and development of anything using amd large socket cpus so that would be threadripper it would include epic cpus they date back to 2016 but there hasn't been a lot of coverage of them until now before that this video is brought to you by lexar's hades rgb ramp lexar's hades ram is available in ddr4 3200 and ddr4 3600 options and specializes by allowing led synchronization including for color intensity and speed changes lexar's hades is looking to compete on both quality and price and the rgb leds allow for easy matching with any builds color profile learn more at the link in the description below this story started actually a couple years ago when we saw a lot for what was described as a lot of amd load generators and emulators and that was interesting to us so we bought it uh this is clearly an amd sp3 socket size chip it's not actually silicon but these are used for generating loads and they're used for testing things like how well your new cooler would perform on threadripper before threadripper actually exists before it's taped out at the fabrication facility that's what all this is for you could also use it for determining how your motherboard performs you can use it for calculating the power that is actually provided to the cpu via software we'll talk about the formulas for that later and when we got this googling amd stardust would barely return any relevant results there are a couple of amd linkedin profiles listing proficiency with the tool there's some poor lost manufacturer asking for help on the amd community forums not really the right place there's scattered important export records at different governments and there's an article from an r d company which casually drops an image of a stardust system in use and all of those results are probably going to get buried by our video as soon as it goes up so let's go over what we got a hold of here on the table today we have three main modules a couple of attachments and load pods these are called load generators and it'll be a fun sort of provenance piece for amd enthusiasts but also just really interesting from understanding how the industry designs products for silicon that doesn't even exist yet so let's go over what we got here first of all this is an alm this is called the sdle2 underscore sp3 alm what this means so sdle stands for static dynamic load emulator the the two i'm not sure what that means it's probably the second generation sp3 is the socket and uh this we're going to talk about in more detail in a moment but this you can see is attached to a basically a cpu now there's no actual silicon in here as we said earlier instead this is the full pin out for what eventually became threadripper or first gen epic this particular unit was last calibrated in 2016 so that's right before thread came out and on the opposite side here you have a distribution plate this is functionally an ihs stand-in integrated heat spreader standing so they can socket a cooler onto it and do some initial dummy heater testing for cb coolers on this uh on what eventually became threader for epic this just plugs into some modules we don't have go over that in a moment as well over here on this side of the table we have two other things these are identical units these are for dimms so these specifically are identical and the stardust ddr3 dimms and they are also sdles or static dynamic load emulators and you can see here that they are hooked up to some memory modules these are ddr 3 modules even though threadripper supports ddr4 epic supports ddr4 for purposes of generating a load this was sufficient for their needs a lot of times load generation is done with mosfets you could use resistors potentially use asics typically they don't use actual sort of functioning memory silicon or cpu silicon it's it's all emulated and that's intentional it's to get it out the door faster so partners can start designing their products before the cpu is actually made which takes the longest to get done on the back of this you can see a number of scope monitoring hookups and the cable that runs two ribbon cable that runs to the memory module this sockets it into a motherboard we don't have on the side of it there's some relay hookups there's a usb cable that would hook up to your computer so you can control this module via software plugged into a normal computer and we actually have a lot of screenshots of that too there's some input output there's a power connection for a barrel plug that we unfortunately don't have and then on this side there's a screen readout and you've got some basic leds for troubleshooting so power i guess it's probably connection there's a warning led and then there's an error led and then just some holes cut in for venting so we're missing a few pieces of this system but we have the most interesting pieces these amd documents we've managed to dig up show a photo of the full kit we're missing number one the sd le2 main unit but we have the dam and the alm connector shown as numbers two and three we also have some of the load pods the memory modules we showed earlier would be one of those we're missing the power supply which means we can't turn it on unfortunately we're missing the heatsink brackets we could make those if we had the power supply that needed them and critically we're missing the motherboard which is shown as number 12 here so the simplest thing that can be done with stardust is to apply a load to the power rails at a set current and there's four rails that are supported by stardust hardware or you could go up to eight if you had two dams paired you can see there's the dam connector right here that would connect to another dam connector for the dam unit now again we can't power it but we do have the software if anyone were to supply us with power for this and we were able to find documentation showing the software amd software has dynamic and static modes which matches the sdle naming in static mode output values are displayed in two lists of eight entries each in the stardust interface and to be clear all this documentation we have we found one for current is located in the software it's prefixed with i and one for voltage prefixed with v these are named based on the hardware present so there's vdd or idd idp or vddp idd underscore soc or the soc current there's voltage for the soc and so forth static current load for each of these rails can be set in a menu to the top left in the software shot vid to the power rails can be controlled with the menu below that and then these rails correspond with the four v mon or voltage monitor and the four current sense out headers on our sp3 ala so all of this equipment actually first came to our attention when hardware info 64 the software started working with the stilt to produce a power reporting deviation metric this is going way back you might remember our coverage of it but just to recap it quickly basically hardware info 64 it's really good software it takes its best guess at what power the cpu is actively consuming but it wasn't accurate or at least not initially on most motherboards the reason for that is because there was a skewed reporting deviation which hardware info later added a percentage to clarify for users so if you saw your power consumption said 100 watts and then hardware info said power reporting deviation 170 you know that 100 watts number it's not accurate it needs to be multiplied against the deviation to figure out where it actually is landing and this is all old coverage that we did a long time ago now a couple years old now coverage is still worth watching for its own sake if you haven't seen it just to get you up to speed but a couple things that was an excellent example of why this type of hardware is useful why stardust is useful and it shows us a few things like telemetry reference current in the stilts words or telemetry gain factor so telemetry reference current or telemetry gain factor is a static number determined per model of motherboard during operation the board's vrm controller passes the cpu current telemetry numbers from 0 to 255 and that's then multiplied against the reference current to get the actual current in amps so if the motherboard manufacturer specifies an incorrect trc value the cpu will report to hardware info that it's drawing more power than it actually is which was the whole problem and why power report and deviation came in to begin with and also what this stuff is supposed to fix but not every motherboard manufacturer has one of these so what they can do instead is send their product to amd to get time on an amd lab dummy load like this to then determine the numbers if they don't always do that which is why we have the problem but they could do that so if the board manufacturer sends a representative to amd's lab to test three or more board samples they would run them through a test suite scaling from 0 to 100 of the thermal design current or tdc and some of the methods for using stardust are crude this for example is how amd's official documentation suggests its manufacturers who spend six thousand six hundred forty dollars on each stardust unit remove the load pod from the motherboard and uh we're not gonna use that method today mostly because we can't power this on otherwise we would use it but if we look a little closer here so you can see on this unit there are actual mounting holes where you could mount this to first of all this would go functionally into a motherboard it would go against another one of these and then you could mount the cooler to the top up here they of course in the manual recommend applying thermal paste to this it's not an ihs and it's not an actual cpu but it's going to get the manufacturers close enough to figure out if their design is going in the right direction for their coolers for example making sure the cold plate covers the whole area versus not and in fact let's actually grab a thread or cpu to compare just for comparison purposes here is a threadripper cpu this is a 2990wx and you can see patterns are very similar not quite the same it's missing of course the capacitors down there but otherwise it's pretty similar if we take off the orange sort of loading mechanism it gives us a little more freedom to position it and it's actually almost sized exactly a little bit off but for something made a year before these cpus actually many years before this particular one even shipped that's not bad now for the ihs well it's not quite the same but uh the intention is that they can at least get a large surface area to test on and all of this maybe helps explain why when the threadripper coolers first launched we really only had a couple options that did well there were the enter max ones those were good and then they gunked up and were terrible and actually the worst coolers that were made for thread over but they did well originally there were the noctua ones with the larger cold plate that actually worked really well but for the most part cooler options were extremely limited for threadripper when it came out uh servers have it a little easier in that regard now for the rest of this so stardust allows setting a precise load current and then monitoring it via the monitoring plugs which you can see here you have vmon and then the rails one through four and then current sends out one through four so the value gets reported back by the vrm controller which should scale linearly and for example the 5950x has a rated tdc of 95 amps so let's just use that as a starting point and make up some numbers this example is completely fabricated the 5950x isn't even one of these types of cpus but the math works the same way if at zero percent of tdc the vrm controller hands back the number one and at one hundred percent it hands back the number 200 then at 50 percent of tdc it should hand back the number 100 in this example the full scale current would be 121 amps and the gain factor or the trc would therefore be 0.475 or 121 divided by 255. the motherboard manufacturer would then bake this trc value into firmware which you're actually seeing happen at a motherboard factory we toured previously on the screen right now if everything went correctly then every time the vrm controller reports a number that number can be multiplied by 0.475 to get current of a 95 amp cpu and that number can be multiplied by v core to get power draw in watts at any given time so that's one highly specific example of what stardust can do but it's representative of the tool in general static dynamic load emulators are dummy loads that can be precisely configured and the way motherboards handle that load can then be measured and adjusted to meet amd's spec intel has its own equipment for performing these same tests and their tools are known as the voltage regulator test tool unlike amd intel has a lot of its test equipment out in the open on its store page including some especially cool items like thermal test vehicles so the all-in-one form factor of the ddr3 units appears to be an older style while the sp3 unit is part of a newer system this is the one known as sdle2 and this is probably sdle just blank or one we were able to dig up some import records for these so these modules were calibrated in 2016 and these modules were last calibrated in 2012 and their copyright stands for 2011. a threadripper didn't launch till 2017 and the memory it could have been in use for a long time just because ddr3 let's open a couple of these things up just while we're working on them if there's no thermal light adhesive here then we'll pull it apart and if there is i might might keep it together let's see cool so there's what it looks like underneath this is just an aluminum heat sink pretty simple one really it's got it's not a thermal pad it actually it used to be thermal adhesive but it's old enough now that this is all dry this is this is over 10 years old this particular module just as a reminder so this thermal adhesive is long since dried or if it was a thermal pad it's now a very flat thermal pad so it might have been like a one mil or 0.5 ml thermal pad either way what's underneath it is this unit so what we can see here there's actually no memory modules on here there are no dimms and we can show you an example of some dims on the screen for another an actual memory module but these are just mosfets it's a common heater type you can use these for dummy heaters and the other option typically uses resistors so that's all that is these can be programmed to go to a set current or a known voltage and then you can test your heat load that's what that part is so for the next stuff the size and shape of all this necessitates special mounting hardware and it also has a the load pods here like this is a load pod this is a load pod these particular ones are only rated for 75 degrees celsius anyway and as fun as it would be to use this for our own thermal testing for threader pro coolers it just makes more sense for us to use real threadripper cpus now that they're out because ultimately these are built in a way that we'd have to get custom hardware so this wouldn't represent the actual shipping units let's open this one up i think this is just a plastic shell so here's the inside of the stardust sdle2 alm there are actually jumpers on here too what do those say so those jumpers say oh it's just rails it says for example dac loop drive underneath it it just says rail 2 loop drive no dac and that's repeated all the way down for different uh rail numbers so that's what those are andrew behind the camera is asking me what assy barcode is and um you use your imagination it doesn't stand for assembly okay a couple probe points on here there's i think that's what this is feel free to correct me in the comments but we've got a seven volt in the ground uh let's go ahead and get this opened up does that come off it does designed in bangalore oh there you go right there as you can see so that's the terminology we've been using load pod connector and that connects to the cable that goes to the actual load pod which is the sp3 cpu dummy i can see hot glue in the assembly which is how we know this is a real engineering product so simple shell here honestly looks like it might just be 3d printed and on the back side we've just got more circuits and actually the bottom left here this one amd copyright 2012 now of course they could print whatever date they want on there but probably that's around the year this was made so if that's the case this is more modular and interchangeable and it's actually just the load pod itself that needs to change which makes these very easy to design on because they'd only need to swap certain parts as things age so that's the inside of the alm let's go ahead and just take this apart too it's not like we can use it anyway and just to be clear with everyone this won't damage it it just opens it okay so taking this one apart all right that was easy enough wow this is all you can tell how long this has been in service when you don't even have to pry it apart so that's pretty cool so under here as you can see it's all mosfets like we expected and they're distributing it fairly evenly i'm not sure to what extent they the manufacturers or amd can control individual regions of this if at all feasibly you could write it in such a way that you can program sort of quadrants to distribute the load and and check for if you have different active uh ccx's or core complexes things like that versus for example two dummy dies that just support the ihs which is what we saw in some of the early ones this is just the plate and it's got a very small either thermal adhesive or thermal pad that's been worn in well underneath i'm thinking i don't know if this is this is probably i don't know they might not necessarily do that by pick and place machine but it kind of looks like it a lot of this though looks like it's done by hand which makes sense because it's low production volume let's set that one aside let's put this back the way it was let's look at the last unit here this is the load emulator for in our unit the memory modules and if you want to grab one of our tool kits to take apart your own amd stardust you can do so on store.gamerzexus.net or to take apart other stuff that you actually have like video cards i'd be in trouble if if i only sold them for stardust but they're compatible uh one other side there's five screws on this not counting the fan this also appears to be 3d printed it's just a plastic shell ah i can see where the previous owner has cracked it and i will not fall for the same tricks so here's the inside of the chassis it's got some light bars basically for the leds to shine through so this is pretty cool this is the inside of the memory dummy load on the right side here we have a simple fan just two cable fan looks like about 40 millimeters or so and just out of curiosity it's a 0.09 amp 12 volt fan not particularly powerful that just pulls some air across the board and then over here we have international patent xxx oh yes that is the most highly sought after patent number quadruple x very well known anyway so now that we've seen the secret patent uh heatsink holder i will attempt to remove it actually there's no point in me removing it all it does is sit on top of a heat sink but it is sitting out this is actually sitting on top of a substrate with some silicon on it so there's something a little more interesting there so this is just the screen let's just go ahead and remove that so this is really it's just an it's an lcd it's not that interesting underneath we've got some xilinx silicon that's interesting because uh amd ended up going on to buy xylinks so i guess they get some use out of them internally for stuff like this andy now owns the company they didn't when they built this as far as i'm aware this may be a little too old for that underneath honestly it's just some more it's it's a couple like firmware chips and things like that nothing too interesting some jumper uh headers and then that's kind of it internally for this thing so not not too crazy interesting other than the xilinx spartan module there so that's it for most of it some final information here there are actually socketed bga load pods as well so this thing's fairly expansible and you can do more with it if you're in development the amd community post we referenced earlier actually talked about needing ft4 and ft5 bga socket support and they included a screenshot to amd's top secret catalog for manufacturing partners only it's the amd community forum it's basically one step below reddit and as you would expect nobody in the forum knew what the hell the manufacturer was talking about when they posted all this probably amd wasn't too happy either if they ever found it now as for those bga apu modules that actually gives us some context for a leak back in 2017 we had to dig this one up the leak stated uh it contained some phrases like stardust adapter mod and stardust and ex load adapter and ex load they showed up several times in the 2017 leak no one really seemed to notice them they were more interested at the time in the vega leaks i don't really have anything else to say after that because vega and we mostly all know how that went uh the ddr3 kits are each connected by ribbon cables and you could add more of them if you happen to have one of these but ours obviously is basically functionless without the power and that brings us to the last point which is if you happen to have a power adapter cable to run to turn on specifically the ddr3 sdles or even to get a whole sdle2 to use with the sp3 alm that we've acquired then reach out you can email team gamersnexus.net we'll see it and we'll try to get one from you we looked into custom making some cables but it would just be easier to source something and as for why we didn't get the last few pieces our understanding is that amd actually holds several of these pieces in their labs so like in taiwan for example where a lot of the motherboard manufacturers are located so that the manufacturers have to go to the lab with other pieces of equipment to run the testing which helps keep it under lock and make sure people like us don't end up with it so anyway that's it for this one pretty fun stuff really more interesting for my history piece and look behind the scenes of what amd is doing for its testing and uh unique content for sure so if you'd like to see more of this you can go to store.gamersaccess.net to help us out directly with buying stuff to review or look at independently or you go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like some bonus videos and subscribe for more thanks for watching we'll see you all next timestardust is probably one of the coolest code names we've encountered and it's attached to this top secret amd test equipment that we've managed to get a hold of these are incredibly rare to find in the wild so to speak where test equipment roams and hides from people like us so this has a few modules we're going to be looking at today these are very important for design and development of anything using amd large socket cpus so that would be threadripper it would include epic cpus they date back to 2016 but there hasn't been a lot of coverage of them until now before that this video is brought to you by lexar's hades rgb ramp lexar's hades ram is available in ddr4 3200 and ddr4 3600 options and specializes by allowing led synchronization including for color intensity and speed changes lexar's hades is looking to compete on both quality and price and the rgb leds allow for easy matching with any builds color profile learn more at the link in the description below this story started actually a couple years ago when we saw a lot for what was described as a lot of amd load generators and emulators and that was interesting to us so we bought it uh this is clearly an amd sp3 socket size chip it's not actually silicon but these are used for generating loads and they're used for testing things like how well your new cooler would perform on threadripper before threadripper actually exists before it's taped out at the fabrication facility that's what all this is for you could also use it for determining how your motherboard performs you can use it for calculating the power that is actually provided to the cpu via software we'll talk about the formulas for that later and when we got this googling amd stardust would barely return any relevant results there are a couple of amd linkedin profiles listing proficiency with the tool there's some poor lost manufacturer asking for help on the amd community forums not really the right place there's scattered important export records at different governments and there's an article from an r d company which casually drops an image of a stardust system in use and all of those results are probably going to get buried by our video as soon as it goes up so let's go over what we got a hold of here on the table today we have three main modules a couple of attachments and load pods these are called load generators and it'll be a fun sort of provenance piece for amd enthusiasts but also just really interesting from understanding how the industry designs products for silicon that doesn't even exist yet so let's go over what we got here first of all this is an alm this is called the sdle2 underscore sp3 alm what this means so sdle stands for static dynamic load emulator the the two i'm not sure what that means it's probably the second generation sp3 is the socket and uh this we're going to talk about in more detail in a moment but this you can see is attached to a basically a cpu now there's no actual silicon in here as we said earlier instead this is the full pin out for what eventually became threadripper or first gen epic this particular unit was last calibrated in 2016 so that's right before thread came out and on the opposite side here you have a distribution plate this is functionally an ihs stand-in integrated heat spreader standing so they can socket a cooler onto it and do some initial dummy heater testing for cb coolers on this uh on what eventually became threader for epic this just plugs into some modules we don't have go over that in a moment as well over here on this side of the table we have two other things these are identical units these are for dimms so these specifically are identical and the stardust ddr3 dimms and they are also sdles or static dynamic load emulators and you can see here that they are hooked up to some memory modules these are ddr 3 modules even though threadripper supports ddr4 epic supports ddr4 for purposes of generating a load this was sufficient for their needs a lot of times load generation is done with mosfets you could use resistors potentially use asics typically they don't use actual sort of functioning memory silicon or cpu silicon it's it's all emulated and that's intentional it's to get it out the door faster so partners can start designing their products before the cpu is actually made which takes the longest to get done on the back of this you can see a number of scope monitoring hookups and the cable that runs two ribbon cable that runs to the memory module this sockets it into a motherboard we don't have on the side of it there's some relay hookups there's a usb cable that would hook up to your computer so you can control this module via software plugged into a normal computer and we actually have a lot of screenshots of that too there's some input output there's a power connection for a barrel plug that we unfortunately don't have and then on this side there's a screen readout and you've got some basic leds for troubleshooting so power i guess it's probably connection there's a warning led and then there's an error led and then just some holes cut in for venting so we're missing a few pieces of this system but we have the most interesting pieces these amd documents we've managed to dig up show a photo of the full kit we're missing number one the sd le2 main unit but we have the dam and the alm connector shown as numbers two and three we also have some of the load pods the memory modules we showed earlier would be one of those we're missing the power supply which means we can't turn it on unfortunately we're missing the heatsink brackets we could make those if we had the power supply that needed them and critically we're missing the motherboard which is shown as number 12 here so the simplest thing that can be done with stardust is to apply a load to the power rails at a set current and there's four rails that are supported by stardust hardware or you could go up to eight if you had two dams paired you can see there's the dam connector right here that would connect to another dam connector for the dam unit now again we can't power it but we do have the software if anyone were to supply us with power for this and we were able to find documentation showing the software amd software has dynamic and static modes which matches the sdle naming in static mode output values are displayed in two lists of eight entries each in the stardust interface and to be clear all this documentation we have we found one for current is located in the software it's prefixed with i and one for voltage prefixed with v these are named based on the hardware present so there's vdd or idd idp or vddp idd underscore soc or the soc current there's voltage for the soc and so forth static current load for each of these rails can be set in a menu to the top left in the software shot vid to the power rails can be controlled with the menu below that and then these rails correspond with the four v mon or voltage monitor and the four current sense out headers on our sp3 ala so all of this equipment actually first came to our attention when hardware info 64 the software started working with the stilt to produce a power reporting deviation metric this is going way back you might remember our coverage of it but just to recap it quickly basically hardware info 64 it's really good software it takes its best guess at what power the cpu is actively consuming but it wasn't accurate or at least not initially on most motherboards the reason for that is because there was a skewed reporting deviation which hardware info later added a percentage to clarify for users so if you saw your power consumption said 100 watts and then hardware info said power reporting deviation 170 you know that 100 watts number it's not accurate it needs to be multiplied against the deviation to figure out where it actually is landing and this is all old coverage that we did a long time ago now a couple years old now coverage is still worth watching for its own sake if you haven't seen it just to get you up to speed but a couple things that was an excellent example of why this type of hardware is useful why stardust is useful and it shows us a few things like telemetry reference current in the stilts words or telemetry gain factor so telemetry reference current or telemetry gain factor is a static number determined per model of motherboard during operation the board's vrm controller passes the cpu current telemetry numbers from 0 to 255 and that's then multiplied against the reference current to get the actual current in amps so if the motherboard manufacturer specifies an incorrect trc value the cpu will report to hardware info that it's drawing more power than it actually is which was the whole problem and why power report and deviation came in to begin with and also what this stuff is supposed to fix but not every motherboard manufacturer has one of these so what they can do instead is send their product to amd to get time on an amd lab dummy load like this to then determine the numbers if they don't always do that which is why we have the problem but they could do that so if the board manufacturer sends a representative to amd's lab to test three or more board samples they would run them through a test suite scaling from 0 to 100 of the thermal design current or tdc and some of the methods for using stardust are crude this for example is how amd's official documentation suggests its manufacturers who spend six thousand six hundred forty dollars on each stardust unit remove the load pod from the motherboard and uh we're not gonna use that method today mostly because we can't power this on otherwise we would use it but if we look a little closer here so you can see on this unit there are actual mounting holes where you could mount this to first of all this would go functionally into a motherboard it would go against another one of these and then you could mount the cooler to the top up here they of course in the manual recommend applying thermal paste to this it's not an ihs and it's not an actual cpu but it's going to get the manufacturers close enough to figure out if their design is going in the right direction for their coolers for example making sure the cold plate covers the whole area versus not and in fact let's actually grab a thread or cpu to compare just for comparison purposes here is a threadripper cpu this is a 2990wx and you can see patterns are very similar not quite the same it's missing of course the capacitors down there but otherwise it's pretty similar if we take off the orange sort of loading mechanism it gives us a little more freedom to position it and it's actually almost sized exactly a little bit off but for something made a year before these cpus actually many years before this particular one even shipped that's not bad now for the ihs well it's not quite the same but uh the intention is that they can at least get a large surface area to test on and all of this maybe helps explain why when the threadripper coolers first launched we really only had a couple options that did well there were the enter max ones those were good and then they gunked up and were terrible and actually the worst coolers that were made for thread over but they did well originally there were the noctua ones with the larger cold plate that actually worked really well but for the most part cooler options were extremely limited for threadripper when it came out uh servers have it a little easier in that regard now for the rest of this so stardust allows setting a precise load current and then monitoring it via the monitoring plugs which you can see here you have vmon and then the rails one through four and then current sends out one through four so the value gets reported back by the vrm controller which should scale linearly and for example the 5950x has a rated tdc of 95 amps so let's just use that as a starting point and make up some numbers this example is completely fabricated the 5950x isn't even one of these types of cpus but the math works the same way if at zero percent of tdc the vrm controller hands back the number one and at one hundred percent it hands back the number 200 then at 50 percent of tdc it should hand back the number 100 in this example the full scale current would be 121 amps and the gain factor or the trc would therefore be 0.475 or 121 divided by 255. the motherboard manufacturer would then bake this trc value into firmware which you're actually seeing happen at a motherboard factory we toured previously on the screen right now if everything went correctly then every time the vrm controller reports a number that number can be multiplied by 0.475 to get current of a 95 amp cpu and that number can be multiplied by v core to get power draw in watts at any given time so that's one highly specific example of what stardust can do but it's representative of the tool in general static dynamic load emulators are dummy loads that can be precisely configured and the way motherboards handle that load can then be measured and adjusted to meet amd's spec intel has its own equipment for performing these same tests and their tools are known as the voltage regulator test tool unlike amd intel has a lot of its test equipment out in the open on its store page including some especially cool items like thermal test vehicles so the all-in-one form factor of the ddr3 units appears to be an older style while the sp3 unit is part of a newer system this is the one known as sdle2 and this is probably sdle just blank or one we were able to dig up some import records for these so these modules were calibrated in 2016 and these modules were last calibrated in 2012 and their copyright stands for 2011. a threadripper didn't launch till 2017 and the memory it could have been in use for a long time just because ddr3 let's open a couple of these things up just while we're working on them if there's no thermal light adhesive here then we'll pull it apart and if there is i might might keep it together let's see cool so there's what it looks like underneath this is just an aluminum heat sink pretty simple one really it's got it's not a thermal pad it actually it used to be thermal adhesive but it's old enough now that this is all dry this is this is over 10 years old this particular module just as a reminder so this thermal adhesive is long since dried or if it was a thermal pad it's now a very flat thermal pad so it might have been like a one mil or 0.5 ml thermal pad either way what's underneath it is this unit so what we can see here there's actually no memory modules on here there are no dimms and we can show you an example of some dims on the screen for another an actual memory module but these are just mosfets it's a common heater type you can use these for dummy heaters and the other option typically uses resistors so that's all that is these can be programmed to go to a set current or a known voltage and then you can test your heat load that's what that part is so for the next stuff the size and shape of all this necessitates special mounting hardware and it also has a the load pods here like this is a load pod this is a load pod these particular ones are only rated for 75 degrees celsius anyway and as fun as it would be to use this for our own thermal testing for threader pro coolers it just makes more sense for us to use real threadripper cpus now that they're out because ultimately these are built in a way that we'd have to get custom hardware so this wouldn't represent the actual shipping units let's open this one up i think this is just a plastic shell so here's the inside of the stardust sdle2 alm there are actually jumpers on here too what do those say so those jumpers say oh it's just rails it says for example dac loop drive underneath it it just says rail 2 loop drive no dac and that's repeated all the way down for different uh rail numbers so that's what those are andrew behind the camera is asking me what assy barcode is and um you use your imagination it doesn't stand for assembly okay a couple probe points on here there's i think that's what this is feel free to correct me in the comments but we've got a seven volt in the ground uh let's go ahead and get this opened up does that come off it does designed in bangalore oh there you go right there as you can see so that's the terminology we've been using load pod connector and that connects to the cable that goes to the actual load pod which is the sp3 cpu dummy i can see hot glue in the assembly which is how we know this is a real engineering product so simple shell here honestly looks like it might just be 3d printed and on the back side we've just got more circuits and actually the bottom left here this one amd copyright 2012 now of course they could print whatever date they want on there but probably that's around the year this was made so if that's the case this is more modular and interchangeable and it's actually just the load pod itself that needs to change which makes these very easy to design on because they'd only need to swap certain parts as things age so that's the inside of the alm let's go ahead and just take this apart too it's not like we can use it anyway and just to be clear with everyone this won't damage it it just opens it okay so taking this one apart all right that was easy enough wow this is all you can tell how long this has been in service when you don't even have to pry it apart so that's pretty cool so under here as you can see it's all mosfets like we expected and they're distributing it fairly evenly i'm not sure to what extent they the manufacturers or amd can control individual regions of this if at all feasibly you could write it in such a way that you can program sort of quadrants to distribute the load and and check for if you have different active uh ccx's or core complexes things like that versus for example two dummy dies that just support the ihs which is what we saw in some of the early ones this is just the plate and it's got a very small either thermal adhesive or thermal pad that's been worn in well underneath i'm thinking i don't know if this is this is probably i don't know they might not necessarily do that by pick and place machine but it kind of looks like it a lot of this though looks like it's done by hand which makes sense because it's low production volume let's set that one aside let's put this back the way it was let's look at the last unit here this is the load emulator for in our unit the memory modules and if you want to grab one of our tool kits to take apart your own amd stardust you can do so on store.gamerzexus.net or to take apart other stuff that you actually have like video cards i'd be in trouble if if i only sold them for stardust but they're compatible uh one other side there's five screws on this not counting the fan this also appears to be 3d printed it's just a plastic shell ah i can see where the previous owner has cracked it and i will not fall for the same tricks so here's the inside of the chassis it's got some light bars basically for the leds to shine through so this is pretty cool this is the inside of the memory dummy load on the right side here we have a simple fan just two cable fan looks like about 40 millimeters or so and just out of curiosity it's a 0.09 amp 12 volt fan not particularly powerful that just pulls some air across the board and then over here we have international patent xxx oh yes that is the most highly sought after patent number quadruple x very well known anyway so now that we've seen the secret patent uh heatsink holder i will attempt to remove it actually there's no point in me removing it all it does is sit on top of a heat sink but it is sitting out this is actually sitting on top of a substrate with some silicon on it so there's something a little more interesting there so this is just the screen let's just go ahead and remove that so this is really it's just an it's an lcd it's not that interesting underneath we've got some xilinx silicon that's interesting because uh amd ended up going on to buy xylinks so i guess they get some use out of them internally for stuff like this andy now owns the company they didn't when they built this as far as i'm aware this may be a little too old for that underneath honestly it's just some more it's it's a couple like firmware chips and things like that nothing too interesting some jumper uh headers and then that's kind of it internally for this thing so not not too crazy interesting other than the xilinx spartan module there so that's it for most of it some final information here there are actually socketed bga load pods as well so this thing's fairly expansible and you can do more with it if you're in development the amd community post we referenced earlier actually talked about needing ft4 and ft5 bga socket support and they included a screenshot to amd's top secret catalog for manufacturing partners only it's the amd community forum it's basically one step below reddit and as you would expect nobody in the forum knew what the hell the manufacturer was talking about when they posted all this probably amd wasn't too happy either if they ever found it now as for those bga apu modules that actually gives us some context for a leak back in 2017 we had to dig this one up the leak stated uh it contained some phrases like stardust adapter mod and stardust and ex load adapter and ex load they showed up several times in the 2017 leak no one really seemed to notice them they were more interested at the time in the vega leaks i don't really have anything else to say after that because vega and we mostly all know how that went uh the ddr3 kits are each connected by ribbon cables and you could add more of them if you happen to have one of these but ours obviously is basically functionless without the power and that brings us to the last point which is if you happen to have a power adapter cable to run to turn on specifically the ddr3 sdles or even to get a whole sdle2 to use with the sp3 alm that we've acquired then reach out you can email team gamersnexus.net we'll see it and we'll try to get one from you we looked into custom making some cables but it would just be easier to source something and as for why we didn't get the last few pieces our understanding is that amd actually holds several of these pieces in their labs so like in taiwan for example where a lot of the motherboard manufacturers are located so that the manufacturers have to go to the lab with other pieces of equipment to run the testing which helps keep it under lock and make sure people like us don't end up with it so anyway that's it for this one pretty fun stuff really more interesting for my history piece and look behind the scenes of what amd is doing for its testing and uh unique content for sure so if you'd like to see more of this you can go to store.gamersaccess.net to help us out directly with buying stuff to review or look at independently or you go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like some bonus videos and subscribe for more thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"