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Ken Shirriff

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

The die photo of the Pentium with functional blocks indicated. Some of the blocks are instruction fetch, instruction decode, branch prediction, and microcode ROM.
12 October at 22:57 | Open on oldbytes.space
2 comments
Paul Evans

@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

13 October at 1:22 | Open on fosstodon.org
SuperIlu

@kenshirriff the p5 and the m68k will always have a very special place in my heart 🥰

13 October at 12:40 | Open on mastodon.social
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