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How do you edit the reference list so the bullet points and numbers match? The reference list automatically puts a number to the references but what do you do for the articles that are just a bare url with a bullet point?
there is no information about e.x. what metal is it made of? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.73.49.6 ( talk) 01:20, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Okay, a pretty big edit. Divided the article into sections. Added a bunch of stuff, cleared up the difference between pipelining and superscalar. I think an improved opening paragraph (betwee "general cpu design" and "1960") would be helpful... might do it later. The stuff at the end (under "additional considerations"), some of it I don't think is appropriate for discussions on CPU design (such as the laser-diode bus replacement...). Also, I don't know much about embedded processor design, so I just left that in its own section at the bottom.
Would it be a good idea to have sample designs under each part? Like "486" as an example of a pipelined processor, "Pentium Pro" as an example scalar processor, and Pentium(II? III? I forget) as an example super-scalar processor?
Also, would it be more appropriate to divide this into multiple articles... like an article on instruction pipelining, and take out most of the discussion on that, and a seperate one for superscalar desgin, and for VLIW, etc. etc. There's already a lot of overlap between this and the CISC and RISC articles.
What is a "one-off design"? This does not seem to be in English. David 20:21 Nov 13, 2002 (UTC)
If no one replies, I'll delete it. David 22:36 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)
The topic of this article is CPU design. Several paragraphs at the end of the article are not relevant to CPU design but to Computer Architecture, a different topic. I suggest they be deleted. Namely the paragraphs talking about real-time schedulers, and virtual memory. Aug 17, 2004.
Deleted ? No, I *moved* them to computer architecture. -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
As a matter of fact-
CRTs were used as RAM. Up until that point, acoustic delay lines were used for computer memory. It was awfully slow to wait for the right bits to come around. Core memory was the first solid-state RAM, embraced because it worked so much better than CRT-based RAM.
I removed some text that seemed inaccurate to me. The author had 32-bit ARMs universally replacing 8-bit processors. Engineers use what's cheapest, and 8-bit CPUs and cores are often smaller and cheaper. Embedded defibrillators, one of the lowest-powered devices on the planet (16 nanoamperes draw), generally use a CMOS CISC core of the 68HC11. The last time I checked, the world's best-selling CPU was an 8-bit CISC microcontroller, the Motoroloa 6809. Also, the 6502 is an 8-bit RISC machine, not a CISC. The 6502 even uses combinatorial decoding of instructions, with no microcode. The Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) was designed as a 32-bit 6502.
I think it's debatable whether the 6502 is RISC or CISC. The 6502 has variable-length instructions (RISC almost all have fixed-length instructions), and a few instructions that do 2 zero-page memory reads and a general memory write (RISC almost all have at most a single memory reference per instruction). -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The article says that "the S/360 [had] the first instruction set designed for data processing, rather than mathematical calculation. I do not believe that this is accurate, given the instruction of the UNIVAC I, the IBM 1401 and others, where mathematical calculations were definitely NOT the only objective.
Additionally, the article states that "the S/360 system was the first computer to make major use of binary coded decimal". Again, to contradict this, the 1401, a predecessor of the S/360 used BCD for its numerical format, as did the IBM 1620.
This article is missing the major computer architecture topic of the 90's - out-of-order execution. It jumps from superscalar to speculative execution & VLIW (neither technique fully successful in the market) while out-of-order chips are selling in the 100's of millions each year (complete success). It was the complexity of OOO execution which started VLIW to be re-examined by research. Dyl 06:34, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
The article currently says
Huh ? What do you mean by "bed" ? -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Those few paragraphs talking about IBM are:
So in my opinion, are not appropriate for this article. Dyl 22:47, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
i was going to make a stub for Feature proximity but figured it might be better to just put a sentence about it in an existing article? research.sun.com
thoughts? - Brewthatistrue 23:53, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds blue sky, but that doesn't stop mention in articles. It doesn't belong in the CPU design article, though. Maybe in the Packaging section of Integrated circuit. - R. S. Shaw 02:33, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
"Baby Steps to our Future: Future Microprocessors" by Ron Fenley http://www.hal-pc.org/journal/03feb/column/baby/baby.html
I'm thinking about splitting this page into multiple articles:
The title "design" doesn't match most of the contents, which is computer architecture/microarchitecture. Comments? Dyl 07:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
This article (currently) perpetuates the myth that the "reduced" in RISC means that there are fewer instructions in the instruction set.
I'm pretty sure that the people designing RISC processors didn't really care too much about how many instructions were in the instruction set.
Instead, designers tried to simplify, or "reduce", individual instructions so that individual instructions could be executed very fast. "Fast" in 2 ways:
Since this seems to be a common myth, should we discuss the myth in the article? (I see it is already discussed in Reduced instruction set computer). -- 70.189.77.59 13:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Under this heading:
4 Markets 4.1 General Purpose Computing 4.1.1 High-end processor economics
I'm not sure if Fujitsu is making it's own high-end processors. If it is a source needs to be added. Thanks. Scifiintel 18:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
The
sequential logic article currently links to [[CPU_design#clockless_CPUs]]
,
a section of this article that apparently no longer exists.
To which article has that information moved?
Or was it accidentally deleted and needs to be restored?
--
75.37.227.177
04:53, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, that section was accidentally deleted in this summary-less edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=CPU_design&diff=prev&oldid=109091120 . So I am restoring that accidental deletion. If it was really *moved* to some other article, not deleted, please tell me to where it moved. -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 02:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I see now there are 2 copies of that "clockless CPU" section. One here in "CPU design". The other in History of general purpose CPUs. What should we do about it? -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 04:08, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I found this a very interesting article to read, but it lacks refs. I've placed one fact tag in the economics section, but it really needs more. I'm hesitant to add the refimprove or related tags. Yngvarr 13:54, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
The merger tag occured without anyone explaining why. Typical! A note and a reason should be put here, when placing a merger tag on the page, uglifying it. I think that a merger is unjustified. It's a common practice to have a short overview section in a main article and a longer detailed article on a more specific topic. I think the state as it is now, is pretty OK. However: the text in Central_processing_unit#Design_and_implementation could, if a mayhap editor get an arbitrary impulse to do so, be shrinked, and text moved to CPU design; or the other way around. It's not necessary to ask, or get a consensus over such a thing. Just do it! (Be bold!) Waiting for consensuses just takes a lot of time, sometimes to no avail. Use consensus as a tool mainly when conflicts arise. Said: Rursus ☻ 08:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I would like to have some "child-taleish" description like, the CPU has one or more registers, usually called A, B, C and similar. The CPU works by, one by one in sequence, pick an opcode from a list of opcodes, which is the program. The opcode is "interpreted" in a certain way, so that "F3" represents adding the value in B to A, setting the flags this-or-that if the number overflows, or "E8" "something" represents loading a value from memory at position numbered something.
The tale should go as following:
Then maybe a stop (?)
Related topic: Anybody who knows how many general CPU registers (SP, PC, cache and similar uncounted) that this or that CPU family has? It seems to me that the Intel family x86 has EAX, EBX, ECX and EDX summing to four. PowerPC? RSx000 (Nintendo?)? 68x00? Said: Rursus ☻ 08:47, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I've added some clarification to the embedded design section. The most significant change was the statement that embedded devices have a lifetime of several years whilst general-purpose processors "rarely stay in production for more than two years due to the rapid pace of progress". This implied that embedded processors do not have a rapid pace of progress, and this isn't the case. Some embedded processors do remain in use for several years, but this is better explained by the fact that many embedded applications have static requirements, and the cost of replacing the processor in a design is prohibitively high compared to the benefits.
Jacob ( talk) 13:49, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
I think this article about "CPU design" should answer the question "how many people does it take to design a CPU?". The article says "Assuming that 100 engineers are needed to design a CPU and the project takes 4 years." but gives no references for those numbers.
I posted some information on how many people it actually did take to make a few famous CPUs. To meet Wikipedia:Verifiability, I added references to back up the numbers I posted. But I put that information in the wrong section of the article -- oops!
That information was deleted [1]. I succumbed to temptation and reverted that edit, moving those references to a different (still not quite correct!) section of the article. Some, but not all of that information was again deleted.
Am I mistaken in thinking that an article titled "CPU design" should mention how many people it takes to design a CPU? -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 04:47, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Unindent
I think it was added to show that a CPU can be designed and implemented with very little resources. Perhaps it should be made more clear that those CPUs are in no way in the same boat as commercial designs. I don't think that having a small section detailing the other end of CPU design can be a bad thing. It would not be a good thing if someone read this article and goes away thinking that CPUs can only be designed by five hundred people over five years, would it? Rilak ( talk) 05:27, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
This article is bad. Its so bad, that it would take me too long, to explain. There is nearly nothing which can be seen as good or sufficient. An expert needs hours; i do not invest them. Tagremover ( talk) 16:07, 20 March 2012 (UTC) Structure improved. Tagremover ( talk) 16:45, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
Although it is generally unwanted, i propose this article could be improved by a little bit essay-style. Tagremover ( talk) 16:13, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
I see -- in Talk:ARM_Holdings#"Architectural_License"; SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd; Oracle v. Google; etc. -- that at least some people seem to think that "buying permission to use [an] instruction set" is a normal and common practice.
I was under the impression that no one needs permission to use an instruction set or any other programming language. (Perhaps ARM holdings actually sells detailed test suite torture tests and other validation tools and engineering technical support for their instruction sets, and someone oversimplifies this to "buying an instruction set", which is then misinterpreted as "buying permission to use an instruction set"?). Am I interpreting Oracle v. Google and SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd incorrectly? (Is an instruction set something that can be copyrighted? patented? mask work protected? trademarked? What parts of a processor design fall into the various intellectual property categories?)
While I am very happy that this article focuses on technical information, I wish someone who understands the business and legal issues -- i.e., someone who is not me -- to say a few words in this article about how one might buy or sell an instruction set -- or whatever it is that Qualcomm bought from ARM Holdings; Microchip Technology bought from MIPS Technologies, etc. -- DavidCary ( talk) 05:45, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
@ Dyl, Guy Harris, Ray Van De Walker, and DavidCary: I propose to state explicitly that PD is a subfield of Integrated circuit design. Any objections? AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 09:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
…modern processor…. Let me propose then to state that it's a subfield of ICD only if the processor is intended to be built (manufactured) in the silicon. Otherwise it's a subject to circuit design and logic synthesis — generally. It should exclude others ways of logic implementations (e.g. relays, vacuum tubes, etc.) and confusion about it. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 10:35, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
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![]() | Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
How do you edit the reference list so the bullet points and numbers match? The reference list automatically puts a number to the references but what do you do for the articles that are just a bare url with a bullet point?
there is no information about e.x. what metal is it made of? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.73.49.6 ( talk) 01:20, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Okay, a pretty big edit. Divided the article into sections. Added a bunch of stuff, cleared up the difference between pipelining and superscalar. I think an improved opening paragraph (betwee "general cpu design" and "1960") would be helpful... might do it later. The stuff at the end (under "additional considerations"), some of it I don't think is appropriate for discussions on CPU design (such as the laser-diode bus replacement...). Also, I don't know much about embedded processor design, so I just left that in its own section at the bottom.
Would it be a good idea to have sample designs under each part? Like "486" as an example of a pipelined processor, "Pentium Pro" as an example scalar processor, and Pentium(II? III? I forget) as an example super-scalar processor?
Also, would it be more appropriate to divide this into multiple articles... like an article on instruction pipelining, and take out most of the discussion on that, and a seperate one for superscalar desgin, and for VLIW, etc. etc. There's already a lot of overlap between this and the CISC and RISC articles.
What is a "one-off design"? This does not seem to be in English. David 20:21 Nov 13, 2002 (UTC)
If no one replies, I'll delete it. David 22:36 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)
The topic of this article is CPU design. Several paragraphs at the end of the article are not relevant to CPU design but to Computer Architecture, a different topic. I suggest they be deleted. Namely the paragraphs talking about real-time schedulers, and virtual memory. Aug 17, 2004.
Deleted ? No, I *moved* them to computer architecture. -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
As a matter of fact-
CRTs were used as RAM. Up until that point, acoustic delay lines were used for computer memory. It was awfully slow to wait for the right bits to come around. Core memory was the first solid-state RAM, embraced because it worked so much better than CRT-based RAM.
I removed some text that seemed inaccurate to me. The author had 32-bit ARMs universally replacing 8-bit processors. Engineers use what's cheapest, and 8-bit CPUs and cores are often smaller and cheaper. Embedded defibrillators, one of the lowest-powered devices on the planet (16 nanoamperes draw), generally use a CMOS CISC core of the 68HC11. The last time I checked, the world's best-selling CPU was an 8-bit CISC microcontroller, the Motoroloa 6809. Also, the 6502 is an 8-bit RISC machine, not a CISC. The 6502 even uses combinatorial decoding of instructions, with no microcode. The Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) was designed as a 32-bit 6502.
I think it's debatable whether the 6502 is RISC or CISC. The 6502 has variable-length instructions (RISC almost all have fixed-length instructions), and a few instructions that do 2 zero-page memory reads and a general memory write (RISC almost all have at most a single memory reference per instruction). -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The article says that "the S/360 [had] the first instruction set designed for data processing, rather than mathematical calculation. I do not believe that this is accurate, given the instruction of the UNIVAC I, the IBM 1401 and others, where mathematical calculations were definitely NOT the only objective.
Additionally, the article states that "the S/360 system was the first computer to make major use of binary coded decimal". Again, to contradict this, the 1401, a predecessor of the S/360 used BCD for its numerical format, as did the IBM 1620.
This article is missing the major computer architecture topic of the 90's - out-of-order execution. It jumps from superscalar to speculative execution & VLIW (neither technique fully successful in the market) while out-of-order chips are selling in the 100's of millions each year (complete success). It was the complexity of OOO execution which started VLIW to be re-examined by research. Dyl 06:34, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)
The article currently says
Huh ? What do you mean by "bed" ? -- DavidCary 22:51, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Those few paragraphs talking about IBM are:
So in my opinion, are not appropriate for this article. Dyl 22:47, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)
i was going to make a stub for Feature proximity but figured it might be better to just put a sentence about it in an existing article? research.sun.com
thoughts? - Brewthatistrue 23:53, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds blue sky, but that doesn't stop mention in articles. It doesn't belong in the CPU design article, though. Maybe in the Packaging section of Integrated circuit. - R. S. Shaw 02:33, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
"Baby Steps to our Future: Future Microprocessors" by Ron Fenley http://www.hal-pc.org/journal/03feb/column/baby/baby.html
I'm thinking about splitting this page into multiple articles:
The title "design" doesn't match most of the contents, which is computer architecture/microarchitecture. Comments? Dyl 07:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
This article (currently) perpetuates the myth that the "reduced" in RISC means that there are fewer instructions in the instruction set.
I'm pretty sure that the people designing RISC processors didn't really care too much about how many instructions were in the instruction set.
Instead, designers tried to simplify, or "reduce", individual instructions so that individual instructions could be executed very fast. "Fast" in 2 ways:
Since this seems to be a common myth, should we discuss the myth in the article? (I see it is already discussed in Reduced instruction set computer). -- 70.189.77.59 13:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Under this heading:
4 Markets 4.1 General Purpose Computing 4.1.1 High-end processor economics
I'm not sure if Fujitsu is making it's own high-end processors. If it is a source needs to be added. Thanks. Scifiintel 18:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
The
sequential logic article currently links to [[CPU_design#clockless_CPUs]]
,
a section of this article that apparently no longer exists.
To which article has that information moved?
Or was it accidentally deleted and needs to be restored?
--
75.37.227.177
04:53, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, that section was accidentally deleted in this summary-less edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=CPU_design&diff=prev&oldid=109091120 . So I am restoring that accidental deletion. If it was really *moved* to some other article, not deleted, please tell me to where it moved. -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 02:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I see now there are 2 copies of that "clockless CPU" section. One here in "CPU design". The other in History of general purpose CPUs. What should we do about it? -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 04:08, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I found this a very interesting article to read, but it lacks refs. I've placed one fact tag in the economics section, but it really needs more. I'm hesitant to add the refimprove or related tags. Yngvarr 13:54, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
The merger tag occured without anyone explaining why. Typical! A note and a reason should be put here, when placing a merger tag on the page, uglifying it. I think that a merger is unjustified. It's a common practice to have a short overview section in a main article and a longer detailed article on a more specific topic. I think the state as it is now, is pretty OK. However: the text in Central_processing_unit#Design_and_implementation could, if a mayhap editor get an arbitrary impulse to do so, be shrinked, and text moved to CPU design; or the other way around. It's not necessary to ask, or get a consensus over such a thing. Just do it! (Be bold!) Waiting for consensuses just takes a lot of time, sometimes to no avail. Use consensus as a tool mainly when conflicts arise. Said: Rursus ☻ 08:30, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I would like to have some "child-taleish" description like, the CPU has one or more registers, usually called A, B, C and similar. The CPU works by, one by one in sequence, pick an opcode from a list of opcodes, which is the program. The opcode is "interpreted" in a certain way, so that "F3" represents adding the value in B to A, setting the flags this-or-that if the number overflows, or "E8" "something" represents loading a value from memory at position numbered something.
The tale should go as following:
Then maybe a stop (?)
Related topic: Anybody who knows how many general CPU registers (SP, PC, cache and similar uncounted) that this or that CPU family has? It seems to me that the Intel family x86 has EAX, EBX, ECX and EDX summing to four. PowerPC? RSx000 (Nintendo?)? 68x00? Said: Rursus ☻ 08:47, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I've added some clarification to the embedded design section. The most significant change was the statement that embedded devices have a lifetime of several years whilst general-purpose processors "rarely stay in production for more than two years due to the rapid pace of progress". This implied that embedded processors do not have a rapid pace of progress, and this isn't the case. Some embedded processors do remain in use for several years, but this is better explained by the fact that many embedded applications have static requirements, and the cost of replacing the processor in a design is prohibitively high compared to the benefits.
Jacob ( talk) 13:49, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
I think this article about "CPU design" should answer the question "how many people does it take to design a CPU?". The article says "Assuming that 100 engineers are needed to design a CPU and the project takes 4 years." but gives no references for those numbers.
I posted some information on how many people it actually did take to make a few famous CPUs. To meet Wikipedia:Verifiability, I added references to back up the numbers I posted. But I put that information in the wrong section of the article -- oops!
That information was deleted [1]. I succumbed to temptation and reverted that edit, moving those references to a different (still not quite correct!) section of the article. Some, but not all of that information was again deleted.
Am I mistaken in thinking that an article titled "CPU design" should mention how many people it takes to design a CPU? -- 68.0.124.33 ( talk) 04:47, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Unindent
I think it was added to show that a CPU can be designed and implemented with very little resources. Perhaps it should be made more clear that those CPUs are in no way in the same boat as commercial designs. I don't think that having a small section detailing the other end of CPU design can be a bad thing. It would not be a good thing if someone read this article and goes away thinking that CPUs can only be designed by five hundred people over five years, would it? Rilak ( talk) 05:27, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
This article is bad. Its so bad, that it would take me too long, to explain. There is nearly nothing which can be seen as good or sufficient. An expert needs hours; i do not invest them. Tagremover ( talk) 16:07, 20 March 2012 (UTC) Structure improved. Tagremover ( talk) 16:45, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
Although it is generally unwanted, i propose this article could be improved by a little bit essay-style. Tagremover ( talk) 16:13, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
I see -- in Talk:ARM_Holdings#"Architectural_License"; SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd; Oracle v. Google; etc. -- that at least some people seem to think that "buying permission to use [an] instruction set" is a normal and common practice.
I was under the impression that no one needs permission to use an instruction set or any other programming language. (Perhaps ARM holdings actually sells detailed test suite torture tests and other validation tools and engineering technical support for their instruction sets, and someone oversimplifies this to "buying an instruction set", which is then misinterpreted as "buying permission to use an instruction set"?). Am I interpreting Oracle v. Google and SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd incorrectly? (Is an instruction set something that can be copyrighted? patented? mask work protected? trademarked? What parts of a processor design fall into the various intellectual property categories?)
While I am very happy that this article focuses on technical information, I wish someone who understands the business and legal issues -- i.e., someone who is not me -- to say a few words in this article about how one might buy or sell an instruction set -- or whatever it is that Qualcomm bought from ARM Holdings; Microchip Technology bought from MIPS Technologies, etc. -- DavidCary ( talk) 05:45, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
@ Dyl, Guy Harris, Ray Van De Walker, and DavidCary: I propose to state explicitly that PD is a subfield of Integrated circuit design. Any objections? AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 09:48, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
…modern processor…. Let me propose then to state that it's a subfield of ICD only if the processor is intended to be built (manufactured) in the silicon. Otherwise it's a subject to circuit design and logic synthesis — generally. It should exclude others ways of logic implementations (e.g. relays, vacuum tubes, etc.) and confusion about it. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 10:35, 11 December 2021 (UTC)