Do Intel & AMD take eachothers CPU's apart??

[Maximilian]

Think they do that? Like dissect the oppositions CPU's to see what makes them better or worse or whatever. Could they even learn anything by pulling apart a CPU? I saw the inside of an athlon XP core and without some sort of really in depth technical manual i dont see how anything could bd learned, it just looked like a funky hologram type thing.

Do other companies do this with products that are easier to dissect? Like Ipod, or a TV or speaker system?

 

[broly8877]

reverse engineering, fairly common, I think.

 

[alent1234]

believe it or not AMD and Intel do alot of research together in some government national lab. Forgot which lab though.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

believe it or not AMD and intel have a legal agreement to share tech. some sort of licensing thingy
so i doubt they need to do stuff like that.

 

[Bateluer]

Even though they do have a cross licensing agreement, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that they were buying a lot of their competitor's chips and putting them under the microscope to learn how to improve their own or exploit its flaws.

 

[zsdersw]

It's highly unlikely that each isn't aware of what the other is planning or has in the works.

 

[Lord Banshee]

I don't think looking under a microscope silicon will help very much at all.

I am not 100% sure how REAL CPUs are created but i do not think that the engineers at intel and amd build each transistor for each digital logic gates... that would be insane.

The probally use a CAD application that has digital IC parts that they build together which when going to the fab it sees this IC parts and put the correct transistors in place for them and optimize when possible.

I guess you could get general ideas about what parts are connected but thats about it, if you were looking at pack of 50 million pipes would you know which little pipes are connected and such?

IF anyone has any real CPU engineering know how let us know, but i have made a simple CPU in class with lots of logic gates and what not very similar to the 68HC11 core, so this is where my 2 cents come from.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Lord Banshee
I don't think looking under a microscope silicon will help very much at all.

I am not 100% sure how REAL CPUs are created but i do not think that the engineers at intel and amd build each transistor for each digital logic gates... that would be insane.

The probally use a CAD application that has digital IC parts that they build together which when going to the fab it sees this IC parts and put the correct transistors in place for them and optimize when possible.

I guess you could get general ideas about what parts are connected but thats about it, if you were looking at pack of 50 million pipes would you know which little pipes are connected and such?

IF anyone has any real CPU engineering know how let us know, but i have made a simple CPU in class with lots of logic gates and what not very similar to the 68HC11 core, so this is where my 2 cents come from.

I believe that the gates are actually hand optimized. It's a "full custom cmos" design as they say. They still use software tools to help them though. ATI and NVidia design at a much higher level using "asic block level" design but that's that big reason why they're clock speeds are so low in comparison to cpus. I'm no expert here so I could be making some mistakes.

Reverse engineering a cpu would be tough. You'd have to laser ablate each interconnect layer individually and I guess you'd need to take pictures of each layer in order to actually determine the circuit layouts.

 

[Lord Banshee]

yeah that would explain the long development times for CPUs compared to GPUs.

I know http://www.theinquirer.net/ post some faq about this subject (CPU design)
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32876

Is this custom transistor design what they call VLSI design?

 

[secretanchitman]

hmm...so did AMD take apart a p4/ HT so it could come up with "reverse hyper-threading"? im curious...

 

[dmens]

Rumor has it AMD inspected a P6's ucode ROM for the K7, but that most likely is a load of crap. That is the last instance of "taking apart" a CPU I've heard of. Physical reverse-engineering is impossible in the CPU industry, plus nobody really cares about the physical constuction of the chip from a design POV. The process teams might be interested in individual transistor construction.

The information that is actually interesting would be figuring out the dataflow and resources of the processor uarch, so competitor performance can be accurately modelled and extrapolated. Not really reverse-engineering, because any knowledge gained from this exercise is basically useless for constructing your own product.

In regards to custom design, layout is just one part of the project and doesn't take as long as one may think, thanks to layout automation and reuse. Conceptual and technical definitions can take years.

 

[Kalessian]

Corporate espionage!

 

[HurleyBird]

Yes, of course. A while back Intel found that AMD was producing some parts or their CPU's at a smaller design process and made it into some weak FUD.

 

[Navid]

This company does just that, reverse engineering of ICs.
http://www.semiconductor.com/

They slice silicon and come up with information on all layers and eventually come up with schematics.

http://www.semiconductor.com/resources/...atabase/view_device.asp?sinumber=13507
Intel dual core

 

[ahxnguyen]

Agreed. Intel's and AMD's headquarters are neighbors - less than 5 minutes of driving. Their engineers, coming from corners of the world, have lunch at same reastaurants, frequent same clubs, may have same girl friends or boy friends...
Loyalty? What's that?

 

[Keysplayr]

I'm thinking by the time and AMD or Intel CPU becomes available (engineering sample or retail) It wouldn't really do the competing company any good to buy up a bunch of CPU's and disect them. Why? Each company has about 4 to 5 years invested in newer designs and architectures in the works that are not available to each other. Why waste time and money trying to learn about a competitor's CPU when in a year or so, a completely different technology might be released from either. I don't pretend to know the semiconductor business, but something like this, to me, does not make sense.

 

[keldog7]

Think about how much money is involved here... Intel's Gross Income was about 38 billion dollars, with a net income for 2005 of about 8.6 BILLION dollars. From that mountain of money, about 5 BILLION dollars went to R&D projects. Given that Intel is really only challenged by AMD (in the semiconductor space, anyway), they would be CRAZY not to spend a few bucks on reverse engineering - though its probably called something else on their accounting books, for obvious reasons.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Lord Banshee
yeah that would explain the long development times for CPUs compared to GPUs.

I know http://www.theinquirer.net/ post some faq about this subject (CPU design)
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32876

Is this custom transistor design what they call VLSI design?

VLSI is something else. The word stands for "vary large scale integration". Of course, "large" is a relative term so vlsi stuff is super common nowadays and hence the term has ceased to become a useful distinction. Anything we would call a "chip" is vlsi. The word came about when the first chips were invented. Before then, circuits were made by wiring physically separate gates together.

I had a professor in my school who's license plate was "VLSI". When I first saw that, I thought "OMG what a geek!".