Gregory's ServerHere's a die photo of the Pentium chip, the original P5 version introduced in 1993. For this photo, I removed the top metal layer (of the three metal layers), making it easier to see the structures underneath. 1/2
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 @kenshirriff One thing I find hard to visualise is the increasing complexity of these later chips. Could you do a side-by-side comparison of maybe this vs 386, or 386 vs something much earlier like a 6502, where the feature size is scaled the same? That would more easily show just how huge the newer chips are, if all transistors were the same size    @kenshirriff @felyashono Well, 3 nm is sort of a marketing term rather than a real dimension. But yes, chips have scaled down amazingly. That's how the M4 has 28 billion transistors while the 1993 Pentium had 3.1 million transistors, an improvement of almost 4 orders of magnitude. |
This diagram shows the main functional blocks of the Pentium. The code and data caches are on the left, recognizable by the uniform rectangles of their storage. To the right are the integer and floating point execution units, the heart of the chip. 2/2