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i would like to know what cores at physical level are in a cpu. some mix of logic gates make a head that's called a core is it?.so one core how does it appear to be in physical level.! PLease am new to this field.Any kind of help i would be obliged to receive. Sorry for my poor technical grammar.

Regards, Snook

snook
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  • This is the kind of thing that gets buried under many, many layers of hierarchical complexity, so it's only reasonable to consider small representative examples of the functionality at full transistor-level detail. However overall, on a multi-core chip much of the structure will be repeated verbatim in each core with the different types of functionality having slightly different appearance, so it's likely you can see some patterns looking at the die. It may be possible to visually identify differences between things such as logic and on-chip cache memory. – Chris Stratton Nov 26 '12 at 15:41

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Originally, CPU's were made of discrete components. Then CPU's were put onto silicon chips, but the rest of the computer was outside of the chip. Multi-processor computers had multiple processor chips. Caches were managed externally. Coprocessors for floating-point instructions were a separate chip.

Then increasingly, integrated circuits came to be made out of functional blocks. The ultimate example of that are modern "systems on a chip": chips that not only have a CPU, but supporting circuitry. For instance, video accelerators, serial communications and ethernet.

On a chip that includes other blocks besides the CPU, the CPU is called the "core".

When you put multiple blocks on a chip, one obvious thing to do is to put multiple CPU cores to build a multiprocessor on a chip.

The cores typically share some resources. For instance, while they may have their own L1 cache, they might share an L2 cache.

So that is what cores are on a physical level: they are CPU blocks put on a chip. It has become common to do this, which is why you hear the term "core" a lot.

Kaz
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  • hmm thanks for the info. So the core manipulates the available resources. it would be nice to know in depth at the transistor level how a real core looks like?.Indeed! i would really want a note about how do the transistors make up that.

    THANKS

     – snook Nov 26 '12 at 11:03
  • @snook sounds like you want to find a book on digital logic design. Or you might look at the course notes for 6.004 at the MIT open courseware site. Look at several year's versions as different lecturers have stressed different aspects. – Chris Stratton Nov 26 '12 at 15:39