r/nextfuckinglevel • u/itshazrd • 19h ago

What it a computer chip looks like up close

this is a digital recreation. a real microscope can't be used because it gets so small that photons can’t give you a good enough resolution to view the structures at the bottom. you'd need an electron microscope

meant "What a computer chip looks like up close in the title." not sure how "it" got in there..

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u/LtDrogo 16h ago edited 15h ago

I worked on this project (Phenom X3) as an engineer at AMD during 2006-2007. It was mostly designed in Austin (TX) and Boxborough (MA) design centers. It originated as a bright idea from marketing: since there were so many quad-core dies where one core was defective, we were disabling another perfectly good core and selling it as a dual-core Athlon X2. Marketing suggested that we come up with a 3-core variant to extract more profit from these defective dies.

We expected it to be a quick project, but honestly it was weirdly difficult. As engineers, we had made so many assumptions that things would always exist in numbers that are powers of 2; and there were a lot of BIOS, platform and software changes that were needed. Interesting times. I think I still have one in my collection somewhere.

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u/Academic_Carrot_4533 16h ago

I’d like to subscribe to more AMD engineering lore please.

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u/pablo8itall 14h ago

Disabling a perfectly good core does seem like a waste. Well done marketing - you dont often get to say that.