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As someone totally unfamiliar with hardware. Can someone explain what exactly I'm looking at here? What do the holes and different colored sections mean?


Teal squares on right: CPUs

Teal rectangles on right (in between squares): L2

Orange mass on left: GPU

Blueish rectangle on bottom: DDR interface (?) Possibly L3, I forget if these actually have L3.


They don't have L3 cache.


You are looking at a picture of the surface of the silicon chip with the circuits etched on it. I'm not sure what the holes are, there are too many of them to be wire pads, perhaps this design uses holes to aid in heat transfer. The colors are post-processing added to the image to highlight different functional units of the chip - I'm not sure what they all mean in this case, but on CPUs, the largest/most uniform areas are always the L2/L3 cache.

If you pick up a packaged CPU, you can't see this surface unless you rip the package apart. In a package, this surface is mounted face down on a tiny PCB which connects the wires to pads or pins for the socket that the CPU is inserted into, and also, a metal lid is slapped on top of the silicon chip (with thermal paste in between). Then a heatsink is slapped on top of the metal lid.


Holes? Do you mean the grid of dots? Those are the flip-chip equivalent of wire pads.


There are too many of them to be wire pads.


Just had an idea. Put holes in the die for gas flow, if there is a keep out region around the hole the flow will remain laminar at the edges provided the pressure balance is correct and not interfere with the chip. Cooling gas could flow directly through the chip.


Next up, microfluidic channels and on chip expansion chambers.


You're looking at a very high level picture of the CPU. The different coloured sections represent the different logical segments of the CPU. I can't tell you specifically what each section is and maybe someone more informed could clear that up but among there will be: registers (memory), alu (math), CU (control, brain), buses (transport), the GPU, and some other miscellaneous sections (IR,PC,etc..). For the holes, I don't know what they mean I have never seen those on a cpu die.




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