Ken Shirriff looks at the gates making up the Pentium processor
Prolific tech investigator Ken Shirriff takes a close (!) look at the original Intel Pentium processor and how it was laid out on silicon.
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to “separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals.” The original Pentium was followed by the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II, and others, spawning a long-running brand of high-performance processors, Intel’s flagship line until the Core processors took over in 2006. The Pentium eventually became virtually synonymous with “PC”.
Early processors in the 1970s were usually designed by manually laying out every transistor individually, fitting transistors together like puzzle pieces to optimize their layout. While this was tedious, it resulted in a highly dense layout.
Because manual layout is slow, difficult, and error-prone, people developed automated approaches such as standard-cell. The idea behind standard-cell is to create a standard library of blocks (cells) to implement each type of gate, flip-flop, and other low-level component. To use a particular circuit, instead of arranging each transistor, you use the standard design from the library.
The die photo of the Intel Pentium processor above shows the standard cells highlighted in red.
Check out the very detailed description of the Pentium that Paul provides in the post here.
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