CPU design is the design engineering task of creating a central processing unit (CPU), a component of computer hardware. It is a subfield of electronics engineering and computer engineering.
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CPU design focuses on these areas:
CPUs designed for high-performance markets might require custom designs for each of these items to achieve frequency, power-dissipation, and chip-area goals.
CPUs designed for lower performance markets might lessen the implementation burden by:
Common logic styles used in CPU design include:
Device types used to implement the logic include:
A CPU design project generally has these major tasks:
As with most complex electronic designs, the logic verification effort (proving that the design does not have bugs) now dominates the project schedule of a CPU.
Key CPU architectural innovations include index register, cache, virtual memory, instruction pipelining, superscalar, CISC, RISC, virtual machine, emulators, microprogram, and stack.
The first CPUs were designed to do mathematical calculations faster and more reliably than human computers.[1]
Each successive generation of CPU might be designed to achieve some of these goals:
Re-designing a CPU core to a smaller die-area helps achieve several of these goals.
Because there are too many programs to test a CPU's speed on all of them, benchmarks were developed. The most famous benchmarks are the SPECint and SPECfp benchmarks developed by Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation and the ConsumerMark benchmark developed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium EEMBC.
Some important measurements include:
Some of these measures conflict. In particular, many design techniques that make a CPU run faster make the "performance per watt", "performance per dollar", and "deterministic response" much worse, and vice versa.
There are several different markets in which CPUs are used. Since each of these markets differ in their requirements for CPUs, the devices designed for one market are in most cases inappropriate for the other markets.
The vast majority of revenues generated from CPU sales is for general purpose computing, that is, desktop, laptop, and server computers commonly used in businesses and homes. In this market, the Intel IA-32 architecture dominates, with its rivals PowerPC and SPARC maintaining much smaller customer bases. Yearly, hundreds of millions of IA-32 architecture CPUs are used by this market. A growing percentage of these processors are for mobile implementations such as netbooks and laptops.[2]
Since these devices are used to run countless different types of programs, these CPU designs are not specifically targeted at one type of application or one function. The demands of being able to run a wide range of programs efficiently has made these CPU designs among the more advanced technically, along with some disadvantages of being relatively costly, and having high power consumption.
In 1984, most high-performance CPUs required four to five years to develop.[3]
Developing new, high-end CPUs is a very costly proposition. Both the logical complexity (needing very large logic design and logic verification teams and simulation farms with perhaps thousands of computers) and the high operating frequencies (needing large circuit design teams and access to the state-of-the-art fabrication process) account for the high cost of design for this type of chip. The design cost of a high-end CPU will be on the order of US $100 million. Since the design of such high-end chips nominally takes about five years to complete, to stay competitive a company has to fund at least two of these large design teams to release products at the rate of 2.5 years per product generation.
As an example, the typical loaded cost for one computer engineer is often quoted to be $250,000 US dollars/year. This includes salary, benefits, CAD tools, computers, office space rent, etc. Assuming that 100 engineers are needed to design a CPU and the project takes 4 years.
Total cost = $250,000 / Engineer-Man/Year x 100 engineers x 4 years = $100,000,000 USD.
The above amount is just an example. The design teams for modern day general purpose CPUs have several hundred team members.
Scientific computing is a much smaller niche market (in revenue and units shipped). It is used in government research labs and universities. Before 1990, CPU design was often done for this market, but mass market CPUs organized into large clusters have proven to be more affordable. The main remaining area of active hardware design and research for scientific computing is for high-speed data transmission systems to connect mass market CPUs.
As measured by units shipped, most CPUs are embedded in other machinery, such as telephones, clocks, appliances, vehicles, and infrastructure. Embedded processors sell in the volume of many billions of units per year, however, mostly at much lower price points than that of the general purpose processors.
These single-function devices differ from the more familiar general-purpose CPUs in several ways:
The embedded CPU family with the largest number of total units shipped is the 8051, averaging nearly a billion units per year.[4] The 8051 is widely used because it is very inexpensive. The design time is now roughly zero, because it is widely available as commercial intellectual property. It is now often embedded as a small part of a larger system on a chip. The silicon cost of an 8051 is now as low as US$0.001, because some implementations use as few as 2,200 logic gates and take 0.0127 square millimeters of silicon[5][6]
As of 2009, more CPUs are produced using the ARM architecture instruction set than any other 32-bit instruction set. The ARM architecture and the first ARM chip were designed in about one and a half years and 5 man years of work time.[7]
The 32-bit Parallax Propeller microcontroller architecture and the first chip were designed by two people in about 10 man years of work time.[8]
It is believed that the 8-bit AVR architecture and first AVR microcontroller was conceived and designed by two students at the Norwegian Institute of Technology.
The 8-bit 6502 architecture and the first MOS Technology 6502 chip were designed in 13 months by a group of about 9 people.[9]
The 32 bit Berkeley RISC I and RISC II architecture and the first chips were mostly designed by a series of students as part of a four quarter sequence of graduate courses.[10] This design became the basis of the commercial SPARC processor design.
For about a decade, every student taking the 6.004 class at MIT was part of a team—each team had one semester to design and build a simple 8 bit CPU out of 7400 series integrated circuits. One team of 4 students designed and built a simple 32 bit CPU during that semester. [11]
Some undergraduate courses require a team of 2 to 5 students to design, implement, and test a simple CPU in a FPGA in a single 15 week semester. [12]
For embedded systems, the highest performance levels are often not needed or desired due to the power consumption requirements. This allows for the use of processors which can be totally implemented by logic synthesis techniques. These synthesized processors can be implemented in a much shorter amount of time, giving quicker time-to-market.
IHS is usually made of copper covered with a nickel plating.
A variety of new CPU design ideas have been proposed, including reconfigurable logic, clockless CPUs, computational RAM, and optical computing.
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