at 14nm I wonder how many 8086 8mhzs can you fit in a die?

Hugo Drax

Diamond Member
Nov 20, 2011
5,647
47
91
I wonder how many 8086 cores can you fit in a 14nm die the size used for a 6700 cpu.

a slightly modified 8086 that would support smp
 

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Jan 2, 2001
32,674
145
106
www.neftastic.com
It's not that difficult to figure out.

Assuming apples to carrots...

A current Skylake cpu sports around 1.35 billion transistors at 14nm.
An 8086 sports around 26,000 transistors at 3 microns.

NOT accounting for anything else other than equivalent transistor counts, you should be able to fit just shy of 52,000 8086's into a Skylake die.

Keep in mind that the 8086 itself was designed around a completely different process and methodology, so things like white space and simple architectural differences would need to be accounted for if you're talking about putting actual unadulterated die-shrunk 8086 dies onto a Skylake die. But regardless, with any process change the actual design of the logic layout will have to change to accommodate the new process anyway. So apples to carrots...
 
Last edited:

The Stilt

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2015
1,709
3,057
106
193147.8 if the process size would scale linearily (which it doesn´t).

The original 8086 was made on 3.2µm (3200nm) process and had die size of 33mm².
 

Thala

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2014
1,355
653
136
193147.8 if the process size would scale linearily (which it doesn´t).

The original 8086 was made on 3.2µm (3200nm) process and had die size of 33mm².

The correct calculation involves translating area into gate equivalents and the moving to 14nm like SunnyD did.

Of course the actual system would involve connecting all the 8086 cores to the DRAM interface via crossbars/NoCs, which should lead to significant routing overhead, which reduces (area) utilisation. So it might not be 52.000 but half of that like 26.000 could be reasonable.
 
Last edited: