Gooday Gaming Guests - What are the Parts of a CPU?

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

This gives a better break down.

Alright so I decided to do a little more about a CPU. I found this article I like. Let's see if I can get it done. And then somebody told me about a game called... That I want to learn about as well. It's on stream. And the name of that game, first of all, let's find that for a second. The name of that game is in my comments here hold on so I'm kind of glad my comments back but as long as

everyone's nice to them we're fine anything strange I don't like it hold on so the game I want is a puzzle game called turning t-u-r-i-n-g complete and it's on stream that's where i found it so it's a puzzle game to learn how to make a cpu and like a simulation so again i'm really uh going forward i want to learn the core of the CPU and then I just found this article which is really good article here so I'm gonna read it's pretty fun it says the top of the article is what is a CPU a CPU or central processing unit is a computer system's most powerful and important component. The CPUs are integrated circuits, solid-state components found in devices of all kinds,

from phones and laptops to PCs, even servers in data centers. What does a PCU do? PCUs are often compared with brains as it is the CPU's jobs to wrangle different streams of load-bearing data moving through the system. In a computer, a CPU is the generalist built to handle the broadcast variety of data at the risk of being a bit reductive. CPUs are good at doing many different things simultaneously reading, writing, fetching, math, logic while GPUs are better at doing the same operation,

a transform, to different data points. So that's interesting. So GPUs have one kind of purpose. CPUs perform a complex juggling act, including tasks such as branch prediction and spectacular execution that must be coordinated in time. This makes a CPU compatible of handling nearly any code with its instruction set of architecture. The anatomy of a CPU. Physically, a CPU is a slice of silicon, crystalline silicon. It's laser etched with special functional designs

and then sealed inside a metal housing which protects the sliver of crystal and helps it shred excess heat uh credit oliver in a pc the p the cpu is socketed into a motherboard, while in a laptop or mobile device, it may be soldered into place. You can remove the desktop. Every semiconductor company has its own flagship design, but the industry has undergone some convergent evolution. Inside any given CPU you'll find a version of the same few components. So the first component in CPU is the control unit. Like an overwatch the control unit job is to direct the flow of information within and between the CPU and other elements.

It decodes information received from the memory, converting the data stream into operations that fit its set of instructions. The second is registers. With all the data moving from a CPU at any given time, the processor needs to have a way to store, to stage data that's fast and easy to access. To keep critical information close at hand, CPUs use a kind of memory called registers. Registers are physical memory defined by their size, given in width, such as 8 bytes, 16 bytes, 32 bytes, and so on. For specialization instructions like AVX-512, CPUs use 512-bit wide registers. Sometimes the units are given as bus widths, which is a reference to bussers, restaurant staff whose job is to quickly clear and bus tables and bring it to the kitchen sink.

These unsung heroes carry tableware using a tub or tray. CPUs keep data in various types of memory, such as buffers, caches, and registers. Fun fact, in many block diagrams you see cache abbreviated as a dollar sign for brevity. Memory management units help to fetch, coordinate, and deliver data that the CPU needs to keep in play. Cores A CPU core is like a reactor core. It's where the work gets done. Most CPUs these days have between 2 and 8 cores which operate at a frequency given in Hertz. Hertz is one cycle per second, megahertz is a million cycles per second, gigahertz

is a billion cycles per second and so on. Each core is responsible for one or more data streams called threads. It gives me a cool diagram here too. CPU cores comprise multiple subunits including ALUs, arithmetic logic units, and FPUs floating-point units in this diagram which is I'm looking at it's an AMD ZN5 desktop version you can trace the flow of information from the front end which includes this control unit through ALUs into the L1 cache. So that's pretty cool. All right, it says, an ALU's job is to handle arithmetic and simple B-O-O-B-O-O-L-E-N logic, B-O-O-L-E-N, B-O-O-L-E-N logic, and not all operations.

The ALU receives information from the registers, processes it according to instructions from the controller, and then stages it in an outer buffer. ALUs are basic building blocks of many types of processors, including CPUs and GPUs. In comparison with the ALU, floating-point units or FPUs handle more complex operations, chiefly decimal math. Floating-point operations are so important for precise work that they lent their name to a unit of computing through thought put. The root of the words like gigaflop and teraflop is an acronym of flops or floating point operations per second. Clock If the control element directs the course

of information, the clock dictates its tempo. Not unlike the timing chain in a car, the entire CPU coordinates itself based on a clock. The timing chain keeps everything physically in sync no matter how fast the engine is running. Likewise, a CPU's clock speed can vary, but whatever that clock is set to, the system runs that frequency. How many CPUs are made? No, how CPUs are made. Once upon a time the process units that powered room-sized components like the ENIAC and UNIVAC were built with macro scale materials like wires and resistors by human technicians. Each transistor shrank. became flat-out impossible for a human to do the work of a fine scale production by hand. Modern chips are made using a beam of

high-energy UV light in a process called photoligography. To make a CPU one begins with a great big chunk of monocrystalline silicon known as a ingot or boil. Boils are grown in clean rooms by vapor deposition and laser cut into disks called wafers. Then each wafer gets a kind of stencil called a mask, a physical pattern that allows light to reach only certain areas. Some CPUs features on the silicone are so teeny that the wafer has to be immersed in a layer of choose to grow the boil on a substrate, a slab of flawless created sapphire.

After etching, most wafers go under a different laser that cuts the wafer into many individual units, which are then encased in a metal housing the silicon housing and pins or electrical contact collectivity make up the CPUs package often simply called a chip why silicon silicon is material of choice for most CPUs because of its desirable electrical properties. Silicon is a semiconductor, neither an insulator, like a noble gas, or a full-fledged conductor, like a copper wire. Electrons move through silicon rapidly, but in ways we can control. Like carbon, silicon has four balanced electrons and predictable behavior when exposed to electric current.

Adding trivalent and prevalent atoms to the silicon vapors changes the electrical properties of the resulting crystal. And when two such regions are laid down side by side in stripes, they form the materials based of a metal-oxidized semiconductor field effect transistor called a MOSFET. M-O-S-F-E-T. Notable CPU makers. Broadly speaking, there are two main classes of CPU divided by their instructions set architect. ISA, x86 and ARM. Intel architect ISA x86 and AMR ARM Intel cores i5 i7 i9 and the kin are x86 as our AMD's raising CPU ARM CPUs are used in smartphones with some limited presence in the data center and supercomputing.

Apple notably switched to ARM processors for its desktop and laptop several years ago. Qualcomm aims to follow suit with its Snapdragon X Elite processor used in some Windows PCs. There's also an open source ISA known as RISC-V. RISC-V is an emerging platform of choice for many embedded projects, particularly those wishing to take advantage of an open source CPU ISA. Some semiconductor companies design CPUs and build them in-house at their own foundries.

During the aviation age, in the heyday of early computing, there were a surprising number of different foundries operated by the likes of IBM, Fitsumi, Toshiba, and additional to other familiar names like Intel and Samsung. Today it's basically Samsung and Intel. CPU foundries are outlandish, hilariously expensive to build and operate. So to turn a profit, a company has to have deep pockets and a guaranteed demand. A foundry can draw as much power as a small city. The industrial machines required to build the CPU are delicate instruments built by another still more exacting machine. Applied Materials and ASML There are only a few dozen of these facilities on the face of the earth

70 semiconductor companies like AMD, Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia are known as Fabless firms Qualcomm and Nvidia are known as fabulous firms because they design CPUs but they don't build them fabulous firms may work with so-called pure play foundries which only make chips from four other customers pure play foundries don't build any of their own designs and they aren't in the direct market competition of their customers. Many if not most fabulous semiconductor companies have their CPUs made at the same gigantic foundry known as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC for short. So much of the world's leading-edge semiconductor production runs through TSMC that its operation has become a geopolitical issue. However, in America, Intel has fab facilities scattered across the West, in addition to TSMC's Arizona foundry.

Intel also has a facility in Ireland and in Israel. In 2009, ADM spun off its manufacturing arm into Global Foundries, which has a fab in Dresden and other massive fab and its headquarters in New York. So that's a fun little one about it.

I learned a lot from just that little one. So the more I click on these Little articles the more they pop up for me so it's cool. So I learned by just reading And listening and again, like I said, I'm gonna go to stream And I want to learn about turning complete turning complete it's a game or it's a game but it's also for knowledge CPU and stuff like that so maybe we'll do some I'll do some once I purchase it I'll play around with a little bit and then we can do some videos

with it, see how it goes, see what I can learn, because again, I'm at the point right now where I'm just, at 56, I just have such a thirst for knowledge, and it's mostly all the things that I wanted to learn when I was a kid, that now I have no distractions, where I can do it now. So there's so many more opportunities to learn now than back then by book. So this is a mix of... I can use ChatGPT, these articles, maybe some sort of a simulation program or two. And I really want to learn more about quantum computers

and how qubits work with entanglement. simulation program or two. And I really want to learn more about quantum computers. And how qubits work with entanglement. So I'm really interested in that. There's a way to simulate that. And those are things that will be in the future. I think sooner than later. And we were talking about how the different

energies, electricity we used for most modern computers, but I was talking about all the other energies that you can use. Electric, magnetic seems to be a big energy for computing in the future, as opposed to, and as well as others, like heat, and there was a bunch of other ones I did the other day. It was really interesting so that's my little thing about cpus i'll continue to um if i see an article it's long enough to get about 20 minutes in i'll i'll bring it into my podcast just what i have brought in lately is i haven't brought my zippy in. But I've just been reading articles. But

we'll find some other use for Zippy as it gets a little bit better. Zippy's my AI guy. My co-host. Co-anchor. So I can learn a lot from that way as well as articles here. And then I'm also going to try the simulation.

We'll see how that goes. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good night. Bye bye.