Over at The Tech Report a guest writer will walk you through on overview of the steps taken to go from block architect's design process straight through to the final product. If you have never really thought how the magic underneath that heatsink comes about this is a good starting place to understand how semiconductors are made. If you are somewhat familiar with the process, there is still a lot to be gleaned from the article as it covers a wide breadth of topics and some of the newer procedures. If you have strong opinions in the debate over the superiority of Verilog or VHDL then you may just want to skip straight to the comments.
"Have you ever wondered how the chips in PCs, smartphones, and other devices go from initial ideas to final products? Rys Sommefeldt walks us through the entire process, from conception through mass production."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Dell working on a next-gen firewall with 120Gbps deep packet inspection @ The Inquirer
- Samsung talks up new flexible AMOLED technology @ DigiTimes
- Fukushima nuclear plant ordered to upgrade from Windows XP @ The Inquirer
Brithing?
Brithing?
http://www.thefreedictionary.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/brith
brith
Also found in: Medical, Wikipedia.
brith (brɪs, brɪt) also bris
n.
the Jewish rite of circumcising a male child as a sign of his becoming a Jew.
Bronze-age lithography.
Bronze-age lithography.
Unintentionally hilarious …
Unintentionally hilarious … i might just leave that as is.
Why don’t you and the gang
Why don’t you and the gang over at the Tech Report try to get some information on ARM’s A72 cores, a little more about the core’s execution resources, a little less about the process node that its fabbed on. How about the number of execution piplines, their type(Integer, FP, etc.), reorder buffer size, etc.
Tired of all of this pseudo technical talk, and ready for some real reporting. CPUs are more than just the process node that they are fabricated on, or core count, so it’s about time all the “Tech” sites start doing a little investigative reporting and get some real information concerning CPU cores other than spouting half of the marketing feed, and other not so useful information.
To date, no information has been provided on that ARM A72 cores other than a few benchmarks, and other superficial information, while no information on the actual core itself in the A72, same goes for the A8/A8X no further information on the actual core execution resources, like execution pipelines, reorder buffers, on DIE connection Buses/fabrics, Etc.
There is not a single tech site outside of a pay wall doing any real technological journalism now that Anand Lal Shimpi was lured to Apple, and promptly sealed in Carbonite. If you are going to be linking to articles try to find some out there with some information, real information about the ARM a72, AMD’s custom K12 ARM core, Apple’s latest A8/A8X, and other cores both ARM reference design, and more importantly the custom ARM cores with the custom microarchitectures that are engineered to run the ARMv8a ISA. A little more than some limited benchmarks, and the process node the CPU core was fabricated with, please!
I don’t think Apple generally
I don’t think Apple generally discloses much about the actual low level specifications of their products. If the company in question doesn’t release the info, then journalist can’t report on it. These specifications are not actually that important anyway. Most enthusiast have a limited understanding of what they mean. Having a wider core or more reorder buffers does not make any guarantees about performance. I think current CPUs are probably more limited by cache design than anything else. The important data is how does it perform in the applications I care about, not how many reorder buffers it has.
The article doesn’t go into
The article doesn’t go into detail in actual wafer production. It takes a surprisingly long time to process a wafer, in addition to the possibly several years lead time on the design.