Hundreds of identical processors are created in batches on a single silicon wafer. Once all the layers are completed, a computer performs a process called wafer sort test. The testing ensures that the chips perform to design specifications. After fabrication, it's time for packaging. The wafer is cut into individual pieces called die. The die is packaged between a substrate and a heat spreader to form a completed processor. The package protects the die and delivers critical power and electrical connections when placed directly into a computer circuit board or mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet.
Intel makes chips that have many different applications and use a variety of packaging technologies. Intel packages undergo final testing for functionality, performance, and power. Chips are electrically coded, visually inspected, and packaged in protective shipping material for shipment to Intel customers and retail.
Skip To Main Content. Safari Chrome Edge Firefox. All of these microprocessors are made by Intel and all of them are improvements on the basic design of the Since , Intel has introduced microprocessors with multiple cores and millions more transistors. But even these microprocessors follow the same general rules as earlier chips. An Intel Core i9 processor can have up to eight cores , each of which can execute any piece of code that ran on the original , only about 6, times faster!
Each core can handle multiple threads of instructions, allowing the computer to manage tasks more efficiently. Intel's product range has widened substantially from the s. In addition, Intel offers the Celeron and Atom processor lines. Celeron is aimed at entry-level computer users, and Atom processors are better for mobile devices and devices that are part of the Internet of Things. While Intel still has a large portion of the market, it has more than its fair share of competitors.
AMD competes with Intel in the PC processor market, but also does big business in graphics processor chips that are popular with PC gamers. Nvidia, famous for its graphics chips, also manufactures CPUs. In , Apple introduced its M-series chips, which are replacing the Intel chips Apple was using for its Macintosh computers.
Samsung may also be working on its own proprietary processor designs. Many more companies build processors for other electronics uses, like cars and smart home products. The market is getting more and more competitive.
A chip is also called an integrated circuit. Generally it is a small, thin piece of silicon onto which the transistors making up the microprocessor have been etched. A chip might be as large as an inch on a side and can contain tens of millions of transistors.
Simpler models might consist of a few thousand transistors etched onto a chip just a few millimeters square. It has become common to see chips in all kinds of devices with multiple cores, each of which is a processor. To understand how a microprocessor works, it is helpful to look inside and learn about the logic used to create one. In the process you can also learn about assembly language — the native language of a microprocessor — and many of the things that engineers can do to boost the speed of a processor.
A microprocessor executes a collection of machine instructions that tell the processor what to do. Based on the instructions, a microprocessor does three basic things:. There may be very sophisticated things that a microprocessor does, but those are its three basic activities. The following diagram shows an extremely simple microprocessor capable of doing those three things:. Although they are not shown in this diagram, there would be control lines from the instruction decoder that would:.
Coming into the instruction decoder are the bits from the test register and the clock line, as well as the bits from the instruction register. The previous section talked about the address and data buses, as well as the RD and WR lines. In our sample microprocessor, we have an address bus 8 bits wide and a data bus 8 bits wide. That means that the microprocessor can address bytes of memory, and it can read or write 8 bits of the memory at a time.
Let's assume that this simple microprocessor has bytes of ROM starting at address 0 and bytes of RAM starting at address ROM stands for read-only memory.
A ROM chip is programmed with a permanent collection of pre-set bytes. The address bus tells the ROM chip which byte to get and place on the data bus. RAM stands for random-access memory. RAM contains bytes of information, and the microprocessor can read or write to those bytes depending on whether the RD or WR line is signaled. One problem with today's RAM chips is that they forget everything once the power goes off.
That is why the computer needs ROM. By the way, nearly all computers contain some amount of ROM it is possible to create a simple computer that contains no RAM — many microcontrollers do this by placing a handful of RAM bytes on the processor chip itself — but generally impossible to create one that contains no ROM. When the microprocessor starts, it begins executing instructions it finds in the BIOS.
The BIOS instructions do things like test the hardware in the machine, and then it goes to the hard disk to fetch the boot sector see How Hard Disks Work for details. The microprocessor then begins executing the boot sector's instructions from RAM. The boot sector program will tell the microprocessor to fetch something else from the hard disk into RAM, which the microprocessor then executes, and so on. This is how the microprocessor loads and executes the entire operating system.
Even the incredibly simple microprocessor shown in the previous example has a fairly large set of instructions that it can perform. The collection of instructions is implemented as bit patterns, each one of which has a different meaning when loaded into the instruction register.
Humans are not particularly good at remembering bit patterns, so a set of short words are defined to represent the different bit patterns. Please consider upgrading to the latest version of your browser by clicking one of the following links. Today silicon chips are everywhere. Intel creates industry-leading and world-first silicon products.
They automate factories and are embedded in automobiles and everyday devices. The most sophisticated processor can contain hundreds of millions or billions of transistors interconnected by fine wires made of copper.
Chips today may have multiple cores. Silicon, the principal ingredient in beach sand, is a natural semiconductor and the most abundant element on Earth except for oxygen. To make wafers, silicon is purified, melted, and cooled to form an ingot, which is then sliced into discs called wafers. A chip is a complex device that forms the brains of every computing device.
While chips look flat, they are three-dimensional structures and may include as many as 30 layers of complex circuitry. Chips are fabricated in batches of wafers in clean rooms that are thousands of times cleaner than hospital operating rooms.
Fab technicians wear special suits, nicknamed bunny suits, designed to keep contaminants such as lint and hair off the wafers during chip manufacturing. Design specifications that include chip size, number of transistors, testing, and production factors are used to create schematics—symbolic representations of the transistors and interconnections that control the flow of electricity though a chip.
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