We often talk about processors, possibly the number 1 item in the hardware world.We talk about their cores, their lithography and the millions of transistors they contain inside, and surely you have already seen many wafers with the chips, but have you ever seen a real CPU inside?In this article we are going to show you, under a microscope, what a processor looks like inside.In order to see a processor under a microscope and know what is inside, it is first necessary to "destroy" it.This is to break it into small pieces that can be placed in the tray of an electron microscope, the only one precise enough to see the transistors, which is the objective.In the video below, courtesy of LaughsMicroscopically, they use a single-core 2.3GHz Intel Celeron D320 processor with 73W TDP, made in 2004 with 90nm lithography.It must be taken into account that with current technology, much more powerful equipment would be needed to be able to take high-resolution images of the transistors that are used today, which is why a processor with such a “large” lithography has been used. , but that still allows us to really see what a real processor is like inside.As you can see in the video and as we have already said, first they break the processor into small pieces that can be adapted to the microscope, and then they zoom in to see it more and more closely.Here you can see one of the fragments before the zoom begins to do its job.An image like this could be obtained with a "domestic" microscope of about 200 magnifications.The part you see is, from top to bottom, 1,668 mm.As the image zooms in, we can see the internal circuitry and connections more clearly.Needless to say, a modern processor is quite a bit more complicated than this Intel Celeron made in 2004, but it's still interesting to see how, having literally split it, we can see the different layers it's made up of.In this image you can already see the transistors perfectly, and notice that the resolution is already 3,500 times larger, showing pieces of 30 micrometers.With 35,000 magnifications we can already see perfectly the logic gates of the transistors.In the same image they are already indicating that the thickness of these is 196.6 nm, and at the bottom you can see, in the legend, what distance is 3 micrometers in comparison.In any case, we recommend you watch the full video, because below they show some additional images of what a CPU looks like inside, and also dyeing them in color to be able to better differentiate their parts.It is curious that, although when Intel and AMD tell us about millions of transistors inside their processors, in reality they are not all the same as might be implied, and the proof is found in this video that shows us that there are various shapes and connections between them inside.The reason for this is none other than the fact that not all logic gates have the same function, and that is that each processor is capable of executing certain instructions because it is physically capable of doing so, neither more nor less.Source > LaughsMicroscopically (Youtube) |Full resolution view