- Intel's sponsored, or at least they tried to.
I have never done this before,
but shortly after I arrived at
Intel's Israel development center,
I ripped up the previously agreed upon sponsorship check.
Because the lab here is so far beyond
anything I have ever seen before in my life
that I would've paid them to take a tour of it.
What you guys are about to see is the full monty.
Not just the facilities and the equipment,
but the people who created many of my favorite CPUs.
From Core 2 duo back in 2006,
all the way to 12th gen Alder Lake.
And somehow, maybe they were all sick,
PR and marketing didn't get in the way,
giving me nearly unlimited access to the engineers,
lab techs and project leads.
You wanna know how the sausage gets made?
Wrong video, but if you wanna know how CPU gets made
you've come to the right place.
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(upbeat music)
Creating a CPU takes a really long time,
from this wishlist scribbled on a whiteboard by engineering
to final delivery
12th gen core was about a 30 month process.
The first step is design,
that takes a year or more of hundreds of engineers
working tirelessly to build a simulation
of a working processor.
Once they're pretty sure it's gonna work,
the blueprints get handed over to the fab
to produce a batch of ES1 or Alpha silicon.
That's gonna take a few months
due to the incredible complexity of the fabrication process.
But that doesn't mean they're gonna be waiting around,
the simulated version of the chip
can be used in the meantime to develop firmware,
software and testing tools.
And launching any new processor design,
let alone the four dies and six different configurations
from nine to 240 Watts of Alder Lake,
requires close collaboration with partners.
So at this stage Intel shares high level timelines
and design considerations, like expected thermals
and power consumption.
Of course, there's no guarantee
that what they get back from the fab is going to work.
In fact, it's pretty much a given that it won't.
Man I would give just about anything
to be a fly on the wall in this room
during a product launch.
This is the power on room,
and when the first ES1 chips roll off the line
Intel flies experts in every field.
Memory, bios, networking, you name it,
to here in Israel where they all get together in this room
with the goal of powering on the chip,
and booting an operating system.
Sounds simple enough, right?
But no, even the best simulations
can't possibly hope to account for all of the problems
that can occur in the real world.
And I give you my personal Linus tech tips guarantee
that if I brought a black light in here
I'd find sweat,
blood and tears
on pretty much every working surface.
- I work more than 24 hours in a day to make it happen.
It's really amazing,
I was even when my wife give a birth was my little child,
it's even more than that.
You will say that. (group cheering)
- Once the most game break bugs are ironed out,
usually through software and firmware workarounds,
that ES1 silicon makes its way out to the validation lab.
Where the goal is to achieve
a much higher level of functionality.
And this place is absolutely wild.
So make sure that you're subscribed
for the deeper dive that's coming.
There is so much crazy gear in here
that I actually extended my trip
to make an additional video about it.
Which is another first.
But let's get you through the basics for now.
It's divided into multiple zones,
each of them focused on validating
either a specific subsystem or some combination.
CI IVT is right outside the power on room,
and this acts as a small scale testing ground
for new fixes, which could easily be rolled out
multiple times a day while the lab is running full tilt.
As you might expect the core IP section,
where they validate the CPU cores themselves is the biggest.
And by an even bigger margin
than you probably already realize,
this lab everything you just saw,
actually only contains the team
that worked Alder Lake's P cores or high performance cores.
The E core, or efficiency core validation lab
is somewhere else entirely.
But if you keep wandering around in here,
you'll find basically everything else.
The mislabeled memory debug team
faced some really unique challenges with Alder Lake
thanks to the four separate memory technologies
that it has to support during the transition
from DDR4 to DDR5.
External devices like Thunderbolt docks and USB drives
need to be tested.
And woo.
This aisle is fondly nicknamed times square,
because it's full of all the different kinds of screens
that you might wanna connect to your computer.
High resolution, high refresh rate, HTMI 2.1,
you name it they've got it.
And sometimes all at once.
This Alder Lake mobile test bench was running 4K video
on two high resolution external monitors,
plus the embedded display port display
to represent the built-in one on your notebook.
It's looking pretty good ladies and gentlemen.
The only thing missing around here
is some quality desk pads from lttstore.com.
What is this mice directly on the table?
All of these teams work in parallel as much as possible,
testing, retesting, making sure that someone's else's fix
didn't break your own biz.
Until finally we end up in SST.
Stress and stability testing
is where the smaller scale validation
now gets run over longer durations,
and at a much greater scale.
Most of the ES1 bugs will be squashed,
or at the very least bound.
And then they go through the whole process again
with more refined beta ES2 silicon.
Then rinse and repeat until finally the design
is ready for prime time.
Which doesn't mean that testing is over.
Every chip that rolls off the line gets validated,
but at Intel scale quality control
can't possibly be done by hand like this.
So let's go downstairs and see some really cool robots,
shall we?
The device under test, in this case a CPU,
gets installed in what's called a tester interface unit.
Which is a
giant PCB that plugs into the back of the green machine
and is covered in probe points
that can be monitored using the oscilloscope in the back.
This tells the engineers exactly what's happening
on even a single pin during the test.
Then when it's ready, the thermal head here,
which we met earlier, presses down and the tests begin.
What you're looking at right now
is basically the same test rig,
but designed for an engineer to stand in front of it
and work on it manually.
And with rigs like these Intel can throw vectors
at anything from a single transistor,
to a block of transistors,
to an entire subsystem of the whole chip,
or any combination of the above.
And they can do it at temperatures ranging from subzero
all the way up to over a hundred degrees,
with the help of the thermal head.
Synthetic tests are fine and good,
but PPV is the end game.
Product platform validation takes place on pretty much
every CPU off the line at this point.
And involves taking that theoretically working processor
and installing it in an actual motherboard,
connected to actual storage memory and peripherals.
And checking to make sure
that everything is working as expected.
These rigs can do all kinds of cool things
that a customer would never encounter in the real world.
They can even have the CPU go to sleep,
but still output to a display.
I'm sure there's a reason that they test that,
but it's not obvious to me.
This one's a little more obvious.
I love this room.
It's all fine and good to have
one processor that works with that one kit of memory
that you validated it with.
But if you wanna deliver a consistent experience
you need way more data.
And robots like this one can help you get it.
Whether you wanna test a huge number of CPUs
with every possible configuration of memory.
Or, run countless chips through a test
where they're using an external graphics card.
This is the place to do it.
And okay, actually it's not countless,
Intel did disclose that over 10,000 systems
get powered on internally before they launch,
in order to hit their quality target.
And they never rest,
remember that timeline we talked about before?
If Alder Lake was started 30 months ago, do the math.
That means Meteor Lake is almost certainly well underway.
And if we were to rifle around
through the stacks and stacks of processors in this place,
we would almost certainly find Raptor Lake chips and more.
They do everything from compute, to communications,
to AI and security here.
And if Alder Lake is anything to go on
all that stuff that's in development
is gonna be hecka exciting.
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If you guys enjoyed this video
maybe go check out the fab tour.
Because I think that's the only thing that we've ever done
that can hold a candle to this tour
of the research and development center.