Today I read that Graphcore, the AI chip maker from the UK, unveiled a new computer chip that packs a remarkable 60 billion transistors and almost 1, processing units into a single silicon wafer.
However big or small a computer chip is in actual physical size, 60 billion transistors sounds like a lot. And it is. But what does this stunning transistor count mean in practice? In other words, the form, design, and implementation of chips have changed over time, but their fundamental operation remains almost unchanged.
This will continue to be the case until we adopt a new processor architecture, for example through quantum processors. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter! Intel and other chip makers are already working on the next generation of chips. These will use transistors that are only 32 nanometers wide. Transistors use grooves etched into the silicon to conduct electrons around the chip.
If you make these slots only 7nm wide, you can place more transistors on top of the chips. By comparison, a , nm hair is thick, about 10, times the channel width. The Core iK is a great all-round processor. It can even compete with 8-core processors with lower clock speeds. The first chips ran at clock rates of 60 and 66 MHz, used 3.
It may be closer to the end, but until then we have at least knots left. And the number of transistors doubles approximately every two years. A transistor is a basic electrical component that changes the flow of current. CPU manufacturing is a very high-precision process, which must be completed by means of machinery. The transistors cut from the wafer will be printed on the CPU base by machinery. Each printed base will be checked to eliminate defective products.
And then add the shell interface to become our common processor product. As we all know, the CPU is the "heart" of the computer and the core of the entire microcomputer system. It mainly reflected in the integration of more and more electronic components. From the beginning of integrating thousands of transistors to the current millions and tens of millions of transistors. How do they process data? The CPU is manufactured on pure silicon material.
A CPU chip contains millions of delicate transistors. People use chemical methods to etch or photoetch transistors on a silicon wafer. Therefore, the CPU is composed of transistors. Simply put, transistors are miniature electronic switches. They are the cornerstone of building a CPU. You can think of a transistor as a light switch.
This on and off is equivalent to the connection and disconnection of the transistor. These two states correspond to the basic states " 0 " and " 1 " in binary. In this way, the computer has the ability to process information. But don't think that the principle of the simple "0" and "1" two-state transistors is very simple. In fact, their development is obtained after years of hard research by scientists. Before transistors, computers relied on slow, inefficient vacuum tubes and mechanical switches to process information.
Later, scientists put two crystals into a silicon crystal, so that the first integrated circuit was created. Seeing this, you must be wondering, how do transistors use the two electronic signals " 0 " and " 1 " to execute instructions and process data?
In fact, all electronic devices have their own circuits and switches. The flow or disconnection of electrons in the circuit is completely controlled by the switch. If you set the switch to OFF, the electron will stop flowing. If you set it to ON, electronics will continue to flow. The switching of ON and OFF of the transistor is only controlled by electronic signals, so we can call the transistor a binary device. In this way, the ON state of the transistor is represented by "1", and the OFF state is represented by "0", which can form the simplest binary number.
The special order and pattern of multiple "1" and "0" generated by many transistors can represent different situations, which are defined as letters, numbers, colors, and graphics. For example, 1 in decimal digits is also "1" in binary mode, 2 is "10" in binary mode, 3 is "11", 4 is "", 5 is "", and 6 is " "and so on, which constitutes the binary language and data used in computer work. Groups of transistors can be combined to store numerical values, as well as to perform logical and digital operations.
Now we already know roughly what the CPU is responsible for, but which components are responsible for processing data and executing programs? ALU is the core of the arithmetic unit. It is based on a full adder, supplemented by a circuit composed of a shift register and corresponding control logic. Under the action of the control signal, it can complete four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and various logical operations. As just mentioned, this is equivalent to the production line in the factory, which is responsible for calculating the data.
RS is essentially a place where data is temporarily stored in the CPU. It stores the data waiting to be processed or the data that has been processed. The time for the CPU to access the register is shorter than the time to access the memory. The use of registers can reduce the number of times the CPU accesses memory, thereby improving the CPU's working speed. However, due to the limitation of the chip area and integration, the capacity of the register set cannot be large.
The register set can be divided into special registers and general registers. The general-purpose register is widely used and can be specified by the programmer. The number of general-purpose registers varies by the microprocessor.
Just like the logistics distribution department of the factory, the control unit is the command and control center of the entire CPU. The control unit consists of three components: the instruction register IR, the instruction decoder ID, and the operation controller OC. It is extremely important to coordinate the orderly work of the entire computer. According to the user's pre-programmed program, the control unit takes each instruction from the register.
In turn, the register puts it in the instruction register IR, determines what operation should be performed by instruction decoding analysis , and then operates the controller OC in accordance with the determined timing, sends micro-operation control signals to the corresponding parts. The operation controller OC mainly includes control logic such as beat pulse generator, control matrix, clock pulse generator, reset circuit, and start-stop circuit. Just like the communication channel between various parts in the factory, the bus is actually a set of wires, a collection of various common signal lines.
The bus used as a " highway " for the common use of all components in the computer to transmit information. Among them, the data bus is used to transmit data information; the address bus is used to transmit address information issued by the CPU; the control bus is used to transmit control signals, timing signals, and status information.
The CPU, which is composed of transistors, is the core of processing data and executing programs, namely the Central Processing Unit. First of all, the internal structure of the CPU can be divided into a control unit, logical operation unit, and storage unit including internal bus and buffer three parts.
The working principle of the CPU is like a factory's processing of products: raw materials program instructions that enter the factory are dispatched by the material distribution department control unit and are sent to the production line logical operation unit to produce finished products processing Data , and then stored in the warehouse storage unit , and finally wait to be sold on the market for use by the application.
In this process, we noticed that from the control unit, the CPU started the formal work. The intermediate process is to perform the arithmetic processing through the logical operation unit, and the handover to the storage unit represents the end of the work. Now, let's see how the data runs in the CPU.
We know that data flows from the input device through the memory and waits for processing by the CPU. The information to be processed is stored in bytes , that is, 8-bit binary numbers or 8 bits are stored as a unit. These pieces of information can be data or instruction. Data can be characters, numbers, or colors in binary representation.
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