Processor under microscope. Nanometer journey

[Music] we all know what a processor looks like we know that there is a small silicon chip under the lid that dissipates heat and other magic of computing happens there it would seem that there is nothing to admire here what can be so beautiful in an ordinary piece of polished metal but as soon as you remove the top layer of silicon from the dye add a drop of immersion oil and the dye begins to radiate all the colors of the rainbow showing its rich in the world of course these colors are false the structures inside have long been nanometer sized and much smaller than the wavelength of light but this way it is much more interesting to look at billions of transistors today i will be your guide to the rich nanometer world this is my computer relax and enjoy [Music] let's start our excursion deep into the good old pentium 2 hails from 1997. the pentium 2s were produced by 180 to 350 nanometer processors and the frequencies reached 450 megahertz ridiculous by modern standards these processors are interesting because among them are new solutions produced by flip chip technology that is when the chip is soldered to the base and not connected to it by wiring on the left is a pentium 2 die made using the old wire bonding technology on the right is its slightly larger counterpart with flip chip at the same time what's interesting is that they were produced by the same process node 250 nanometers an increase in the area occurred only because of the transition to the new technology yes at that time there was no point in the new production method but it laid the foundation for the creation of modern processors with a thousand contacts a moment of evolution still visible to the eye and now for the sake of contrast let's dive into the familiar 14 nanometers anyone can destroy old chips but doing so to more powerful cpus is much more expensive but still there are people who did it and we have the opportunity to see what is under the top layer of silicon in the fast 8 core core 9900k in this picture you can clearly see eight rectangles which are cores and the large area on the right is integrated graphics which occupies almost a third of the entire die few people cared about it before but now the times have changed of course after such barbaric experiments the processor died but in this case the beauty was definitely worth the sacrifice [Music] thanks to amd no one is surprised by eight cores now the famous german overclocker roman derbau or harton literally broke by no means cheap threadripper 1950x to show us his 16 cores [Music] in 2017 it was the same 14 nanometers process node or rather they were called the same as intel but in fact at that time the team blue nanometers were actually thinner inside the huge processor there were four eight core chiplets in each of which you can clearly see the two groups of four cores each this is exactly the reason for the high delays of these chips but still such a processor looks like a masterpiece intel for example has not yet reached chiplet technology or maybe it no longer needs it looking at the beautiful iridescent chips many probably wonder what do the processors actually look like inside can we actually see that of course we can all it takes is to get a chip of a process note thicker than the wavelength of visible light which allows you to see its insides in a conventional light microscope perhaps the most striking example is the intel 4004 the company's first microprocessor which 50 years ago made a real revolution in the micro electronic industry its process node of 10 microns is much thicker than the wavelength of visible radiation which makes it an ideal candidate for study and i must say it does not look particularly impressive orange stripes are copper tracks gray ones have various silicon structures and yes these are the real colors of a processor according to intel the computing power of 10 year old second gen intel core processors with a billion transistors exceeds the power of the first intel processor by at least 350 000 times incredible progress in 40 years we won't see that now speaking of transistors some recent processors already have more than 40 billion tiny switches that are impossible to see in a light microscope but if you really want to find out what a transistor actually looks like then you can turn to the old simple logic chips for example the soviet 3320a which was produced in zelenograd in the 70s this golden maze has nothing to do with the expression process node because the structure of the chip which consists of a couple of four eye dash and e-logic elements can be seen literally through a school microscope and yes as you can see from the photo there is no magic and complex electronics here the transistor itself is very simple which allows you to significantly reduce them and produce them by billions [Music] okay we have talked about processors for a while now let's see what gpu chips look like yes destroying graphics chips that are in shortage now looks like blasphemy but i heist to reassure you the photos were taken before the shortage so we can take a look at the large 28 nanometer amd fidget chip which worked in 2015 fury graphics cards and was equipped with 4 gigabytes of hbm memory almost 9 billion transistors six years have passed these cards are no longer new and you can find them for as much as 230 us dollars and here's another picture of another gpu this time gpu 102 which was put in the top-notch gtx 1080 ti you can clearly see six gbc clusters which provide as many as 3.5 000 stream processors the power of 12 billion transistors in 2017 for 500 dollars now let us veer off have you ever wondered what an optical mouse sensor looks like in fact it's quite interesting because this is a combination of a photo sensor in a chip here you can see the photo sensor of an old mouse with a matrix resolution of only 22 by 22 pixels but this is quite enough to detect surface changes and thereby determine the mouse shift and taking into account the fact that it needs to be done quickly the chip itself is located in the same die with the photo matrix in modern mice the resolution of the matrix is higher and reaches hundreds by hundreds of pixels which allows them to be more accurate and fast but in general the sensors look the same for example in this picture you can see the insides of pixart bmw 3310 [Music] let's go back to processors this time mobile the modern arm chips can literally be called art because several clusters of course and gpus and numerous controllers are hidden in one die for example this is what the 8 nanometer extenus 9820 looks like right away it's hard to figure out where is what but we still could determine that in the lower right corner there are two large m4 cores that can operate at the frequency of up to three gigahertz above them are two medium cortex a75 cores and four small cortex a55 cores which are noticeably smaller and less performant on the bottom left you can see a dual core neural processor and above it is a large miley gpu with 12 cores interestingly arm chips are very similar to apus from consoles and this is not a coincidence the latter also have processor cores graphics and various controllers on the same chip this is what the 16 nanometer chip from xbox one x looks like you can clearly see how big the amd graphics with 40 compute units are it takes 3 4 of the chip but it makes it quite easy to overlook the 8 amd jaguar processor cores the thing is in fact this is the stripped down architecture that was used for various ultrabook chips by team red which is why they size is so small [Music] while amd continues to bring the chiplet structure of processors to the masses intel still stands for one big chip and in the case of the high performance lineup the company's gigantomania surprises indeed so in the case of core i9 17 980 xe as many as 18 cores are placed on just one chip it goes without saying that such a cpu costs a lot but roman der bower got a malfunctioned one from one of his subscribers which allowed him to perform the autopsy of the patient without any regrets the pictures are really amazing 18 huge cores close to each other which is why the declared heat package is as much as 165 watts which in fact goes beyond 200 under load but the delays between the cores are just fine finally have you ever wondered what a russian processor looks like inside are they any different from all the rest of the processors in fact no the opening of the latest bicol processor showed 2 billion transistors at 28 nanometers this arm chip has two four core clusters in melee graphics and is manufactured at tsmc so there are obviously few internal differences from other arm chips and the structure is really similar to the picture of exinus above by the way based on the buy call simple but by no means cheap pcs are already being produced and sold and most interestingly after manipulating the bios it is possible to run windows 11 on them yes most of the drivers could not be found but the system still is quite snappy so the future of russian cpus is not only the nerdy linux but also the quite ordinary windows this nanoworld is much smaller than the vast world of viruses which was ironically discovered by tobacco companies fighting plant diseases a lower level world a lower level that our contemporaries are creating and this world is becoming more and more complicated and interesting as you can see processes have come a long way from simple integrated circuits the insides of which can be seen literally under a magnifying glass to high-end chips consisting of billions of transistors and for many years now human has not been the main link in the chain of production of semiconductor chips a lifetime would not be enough to place such huge numbers of miniature switches in a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail yes you got it right computers design processors smart machines create their own kind [Applause] who knows maybe in some 10 years computers will decide that we are superfluous in this process at all john connor knows what i'm talking about i wish your inner world to successfully fight the world of viruses what we are telling you about the nanometer world this was my computer my name is mikhail krashen and i hope you enjoyed it until next time [Music] you

Channel: My Computer

Views: 722,433

Keywords: My computer, processor microscope, inside the cpu, nanometer world, processor die, computer hardware, semiconductor, cpu under the microscope, nano scale, circut under microscope, cpu manufacturing

Id: yvepmXmoZJA

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022