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How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

blog.robertelder.org

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Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#11

Post by irishloop »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

At the public university engineering program I attended in 2000ish (UConn), we offered CompSci (mostly software focused), CompEng (mostly hardware focused), and CompSci+Eng (a balance of both). Either Eng program included several courses on hardware-level EE courses and circuit design, hardware engineering, etc.

One of the guys I did my senior design project with ended up working with AMD on processor stuff, so there are educational opportunities, I think you just need to be more on the CompEng/EE side of things and make it your focus.

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#12

Post by thrashh »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

…electrical engineer?

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#13

Post by 2143 »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

> Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

Perhaps by studying Electronics Engineering (also called Computer Engineering, which is different from Computer Science).

At my university in USA, I remember recruiters from Intel setting up a stall or something to recruit students. It was in the building which mostly has computer science and computer engineering students, so I guess that's who they were looking for.

This was less than 5 years ago.

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#14

Post by [deleted] »

irishloop wrote: post #11
lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

At the public university engineering program I attended in 2000ish (UConn), we offered CompSci (mostly software focused), CompEng (mostly hardware focused), and CompSci+Eng (a balance of both). Either Eng program included several courses on hardware-level EE courses and circuit design, hardware engineering, etc. One of the guys I did my senior design project with ended up working with AMD on processor stuff, so there…

[deleted]

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#15

Post by GhettoComputers »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

Not trying to be rude, you need to be motivated enough to seek the answers yourself if its your truly important. If you want it badly you will find your answers. Here's a google sponsored inititive to help custom chip designers.

https://www.hackster.io/news/efabless-google-and-skywater-ar... https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/diy-chip-10k...

Places like Shenzhen have a very good environment for this as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taZJblMAuko

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#16

Post by f00zz »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

> this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself

It isn't! The book "Code" by Charles Petzold is a great introduction to digital electronics and computer architecture. There's also the "Nand to Tetris" course (which I didn't take but people here are always recommending). You can build a simple CPU in a digital circuit simulator. If you're feeling adventurous you can write it in Verilog and simulate it, and even get it to run on a FPGA. This is all stuff you can teach yourself.

Of course this is not quite enough to make you a chip designer at AMD, but you'll know enough to get over the feeling that a microprocessor is an inscrutable artifact of alien technology brought from Alpha Centauri.

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#17

Post by zackmorris »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

I got my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree in 1999 from UIUC and learned everything but the very lowest-level chemistry, because I specialized in the VLSI (circuit design) side instead of fab. At that point, stuff like MIPS and the DEC Alpha were popular, and computers were just breaking the 1 GHz barrier.

Unfortunately the dot bomb happened right after I graduated, and the anti-intellectual backlash of the early 2000s killed independent research during the outsourcing era, which never recovered.

Sadly from my perspective, very little has changed in 20 years. Computers only reached about 3-4 GHz, and kept doubling down on single-threaded performance for so long that companies like Intel missed out on multicore. Only Apple with their M1 seems to have any will to venture outside of the status quo. The future is going to be 256+ symmetric cores with local memories that are virtualized to appear as a single coherent address space. But that could take another 20 years to get here.

Meanwhile we're stuck with SIMD now instead of MIMD, so can't explore the interesting functional paradigms. Basically I see the world from a formal/academic standpoint, so I think in terms of stuff like functional programming, synchronous blocking communication, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, stuff like that. But the world went with imperative programming, nondetermistic async, rasterization, neural nets.. just really complicated and informal systems that are difficult to scale and personally I don't think much of. Like with software, honestly so much is wrong with the hardware world right now that it's ripe for disruption.

Also hardware was a dying industry 20 years ago. We wanted fully programmable FPGAs to make our own processors, but they got mired in proprietary nonsense. There really isn't a solution right now. Maybe renting time at AWS blah.

I feel a bit personally responsible for the lackluster innovation, because I wasn't there to help. I wasted it working a bunch of dead end jobs, trying to make rent like the rest of you. And writing text wall rants on forums that nobody will ever read anyway. So ya, don't be like me. Get involved, go work for a startup or a struggling company that has the resources to fix chips, and most importantly, have fun.

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#18

Post by rhapsodic »

zackmorris wrote: post #17
lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

I got my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree in 1999 from UIUC and learned everything but the very lowest-level chemistry, because I specialized in the VLSI (circuit design) side instead of fab. At that point, stuff like MIPS and the DEC Alpha were popular, and computers were just breaking the 1 GHz barrier. Unfortunately the dot bomb happened right after I graduated, and the anti-intellectual backlash o…

> anti-intellectual backlash of the early 2000s

I've never heard of this. Could you elaborate, please?

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#19

Post by zoenolan »

lsiunsuex wrote: post #8

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

This was about 20 years ago, things maybe different now.

I got hired on the architecture side for GPU's after working a few years. My academic background was computer graphics with a focus on parallel algorithms and performance optimisation. After a couple of years working mostly on low level code, C/C++ and assembly. I got a call from a recruiter.

The semiconductor industry is larger than just Intel and AMD. Like any job, taking some time to look around the career pages should give you a good idea what skills they are interested in.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/ is a nice introduction to the how processors are put together. Book wise Hennessy and Patterson's books, Computer Organization and Design and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach are good for background. I never did much on the layout side but learning Verilog and/or VHDL would be helpful but not essential.

Re: How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

#20

Post by hedgehog »

azalemeth wrote: post #9
hedgehog wrote: post #4

Nice illustrations, though step 16 is pretty much "Draw the rest of the F** owl."

I'm pretty sure producing the monocrystalline ingot with seven 9's purity also counts as the "rest of the owl", along with basically every other step in this guide. I'm not even convinced that the sawing step is simple – thermal stresses, limitations, impurities, tool hardness and dimensional accuracy concerns, minimising material losses, etc. (I loved his butter knife).

Yeah fair. Pretty much every part of the process is bonkers. Just the light sources draw something like 1 megawatt and weigh over 100 tons (for extreme ultraviolet). EUV gets absorbed by everything including air, which is bad, but the light source requires plasma so somehow you need both the plasma and vacuum in the same machine without a window or whatever to separate them. Then the features on the chip are so small that random variance in the spatial distribution of landing photons causes defects. And that's just the light, it's amazing anyone can make the process work at all.
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