From concept to design to manufacturing and everything in between, the processor inside your rig was years in the making
Designing and manufacturing a modern CPU is a huge project. It requires both backward compatibility and an understanding of where PC workloads are going in the future—a delicate balancing act made more difficult by the huge engineering staffs and massive dollar outlays involved. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to build a Core i7 or AMD Phenom II processor.
Before the manufacturing plant starts churning out chips, there are a few critical preliminary steps. Prior to the first circuit being laid out or the first simulation run, the designers need to know exactly what it is they’re designing. This phase takes input from many sources. Marketing gets involved, with predictions of what users will need when the CPU actually ships, usually two to four years in the future. Engineering and performance teams feed in billions of traces of actual applications being run on current-gen CPUs, so the designers can see how existing CPUs perform under real-world conditions.
The Design Process
After the specification phase, the design phase begins in earnest. Design involves creating a design document, validating the design with simulations, and laying out the design.
The architecture team begins by defining how the CPU is supposed to work. How many registers will it have? What’s the power budget? How many cores? How much cache? These and thousands of smaller details are all ironed out in the design (Read more...)