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CPU Design: Part 2 - Logic Design FundamentalsYep. You either need more ALUs, or you need to be better at keeping them busy, or both. -
CPU Design: Part 2 - Logic Design Fundamentals"slow increase in ALU count". Would this be correct?: A key way chips advance is by increasing IPC, which specifically means increasing...
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CPU Design: Part 2 - Logic Design FundamentalsIncreased core sizes largely going to bigger structures like caches, branch predictors, TLB stuff, etc. Also, slow increase in ALU count, and...
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CPU Design: Part 2 - Logic Design FundamentalsAs chips advance, they get bigger. Some of this is due to more cores, more cache, etc. But another part of it is more logic circuits/core. From...
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CPU Design: Part 7 - Fun with Logic DesignYeah, to a cpu designer, things like 1-bit no-carry adders, xors, and multiplexers are the same thing. So + is just OR, but has some of the...
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CPU Design: Part 7 - Fun with Logic Design
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 33 min read
- Views: 666
- Reaction score: 2
- Comments: 2
If you have a logical function that needs to be implemented, how do you break that down into the logic gates that correspond to “standard cells”... -
CPU Design: Part 6 - Clocks
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 18 min read
- Views: 566
- Reaction score: 4
Tick tock. To a CPU designer, a clock is a signal that is used to synchronize the behavior of different circuits. As discussed in earlier... -
CPU Design: Part 5 - Caches
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 24 min read
- Views: 1K
- Reaction score: 4
- Comments: 21
In Part 4 I explained that when it comes to memory, you essentially have to trade off capacity vs. speed. If you want a large pool of available... -
CPU Design: Part 4 - Memories
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 14 min read
- Views: 306
- Reaction score: 5
- Comments: 6
Introduction I’ve received a request to talk about caches, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. In fact, my Ph.D. dissertation was a... -
CPU Design: Part 3 - Power
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 15 min read
- Views: 302
- Reaction score: 7
- Comments: 3
Power efficiency has increasingly become an important issue in CPU design. Performing calculations is not free - you have to supply power in... -
CPU Design: Part 2 - Logic Design Fundamentals
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 13 min read
- Views: 540
- Reaction score: 4
- Comments: 6
In Part 1, we discussed how the architect decides how the processor behaves. The next step is for the logic designer to decide how to produce... -
Posting Articles
- Eric
- 1 min read
- Views: 233
Welcome to the Articles section where anyone can share, it's as simple as a regular post with a few added benefits. It's important to add an image... -
CPU Design: Part 1 - Architecture
- Cliff Maier, PhD
- 4 min read
- Views: 534
- Reaction score: 6
- Comments: 5
”Architecture” may mean different things at different companies, but at the companies I worked at it had a fairly consistent meaning...