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in an absolutely unprecedented move Intel has given me access to the

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engineers in their soc validation lab

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wow that is so cool i absolutely love it okay gotta go bye

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this is an opportunity to talk to some of the smartest people in the world

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so i immediately did what anyone would do i asked them

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what came first the chicken or the egg

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that's simple you must build both the chicken and an egg in parallel to make

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sure they're compatible with each other an

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unconventional answer but one that makes sense when you consider the cutting edge

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work that they do inside these walls take pci express gen 5 for example

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how can you build a compatible CPU and motherboard when there are no devices to

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test them with well you create one from scratch

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so cool just like i created this segway to our

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sponsor i fix it for repairs on the go ifixit has you covered find out more

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about the ultra portable minnow and moire sets and how they can make your

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repairs easier at the end of the video

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i was so blown away by the insane gear

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that they have in the validation lab when i was shooting my general tour of

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the israel development center that i immediately cancelled my return flight

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so that i could come back another day and get you guys a closer look at it

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this lab's goal is twofold first they need to test every possible function of

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the soc from logic to memory to

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integrated GPU to connectivity and second they need to test at scale to

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ensure that their results are going to be applicable across thousands hundreds

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of thousands or even millions of units of processors because it's the nature of

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the silicon business that there's going to be a spectrum of behavior from the

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silicon parts and you've got a test at scale to ensure that this whole spectrum

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is validated that's why this place is absolutely packed to the gills with test

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benches most of the ones we're looking at in here have the same core components a

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12th gen alder light processor on top of one of Intel's rvp or reference

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validation platform motherboards which man these things include some really

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cool functionality for like remote control and testing and all kinds of

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stuff i'm actually planning another follow-up video focusing just on this

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bad boy including a look at the liquid nitrogen cooled board that they've got

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in the overclocking lab so get subscribed to make sure you don't miss it

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beyond the base platform though there is a broad spectrum of different functions

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that the lab might want to look at that require different specialized equipment

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so let's start over here pci express gen 5 is one of the key

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selling points of 12th gen an Intel knew going into it that they were going to be

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well ahead of any consumer need for this kind of bandwidth it's twice as fast as

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gen 4 lane for lane and even ahead of market availability of any compatible

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devices but they did it anyway because there are advantages to being the market

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leader on new technologies not only does this kind of future compatibility give

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Intel a valuable marketing bullet point for their platform but it's also very

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likely that as NVIDIA or even AMD are developing their next-gen pci express

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gen 5 gpus that they're going to end up using Intel's alder lake platform for

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their own internal validation making it much more likely that any early quirks

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are going to be accounted for before those products ship to consumers

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of course living on the bleeding edge like that means that you've got to get

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creative sometimes okay this is a bit of an aside but this

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is my first hands-on with a pci express gen 5 device i mean not just me this is

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almost anyone's first hand on with the pci express gen 5 device this is so cool

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and immediately there are some noticeable physical changes compared to

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pci express gen 4. for example in gen 4

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here at the front of the connector only the presence pins were shorter so these

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tell the motherboard that there's a device installed but in gen 5 the

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presence pins and the power pins are shorter as well and this seems to be a

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result of what we've learned about hot plugging from years of Thunderbolt and

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NVMe storage devices so this change

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ensures that all the data connections are complete before the board powers up

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there are also some obvious changes to the data pin layout presumably to

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improve signal integrity because when we double our speed it means that we are

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far more sensitive to signaling issues you can actually see more detail about

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this in our HDMI cable tester video showing how the eye works and

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what happens if the eye gets too small you must be thinking though

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okay cool card but what does it do

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the answer is nothing but also

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everything there's no GPU or storage or

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network controller on here nothing like that the card is non-functioning in that

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sense but what it does do is generate and monitor traffic or errors and it can

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do so at every layer link physical

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transactional giving Intel's engineers almost full control of what they want to

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do with it most of these functions can be programmed in band so that is to say

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over the pci express bus and then the test can be executed but some of them

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are actually handled with dip switches that can do things like limit the speed

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the pci express generation the card runs at uh limit the number of lanes that are

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available i mean obviously you don't want to go build a whole bunch of

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different physical cards for 1x 4x 8x

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and 16x right another thing you don't want to build is custom silicon every

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time you find a hardware bug that's why this card uses a field programmable gate

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array or an fpga fpgas are prohibitively expensive

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compared to asics or normal computer chips so you'll only rarely see them in

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consumer products apple's afterburner accelerator card is an example but when

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you're developing a product that is meant to follow a specification that

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ain't finalized yet fpgas are a must

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because like it says in the name rather than being locked into a particular

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configuration they're actually hardware reprogrammable in the field allowing the

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engineers to make changes to the chip to address any shortcomings without wasting

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months designing and manufacturing a new asic every single time

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now i asked about the 8-pin power connector here and it turns out that

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it's not actually a requirement for the onboard fpga but rather it's there to

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validate external power functionality and as for the RAM slot they were

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extremely cagey about the RAM slot something something another mode we

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don't use i had kind of hoped it was for something

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like testing throughput to a known high bandwidth device or something like that

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but Intel has super high performance fpgas

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so obviously they're using their own so they wouldn't really need that

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i don't know this is really cool one of the big

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validation challenges today is usb type-c with all the different power

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envelopes and protocols DisplayPort native usb Thunderbolt not to mention

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daisy chaining with the latter we've reached a point of exponential possible

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configuration growth to the point where it is

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practically speaking impossible to test every single combination but if you've

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got one of these you can do an awful lot it doesn't

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really have a name but this usbc test

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rig is super cool each one of these wings hanging off of

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the test bench here has a variety of devices hanging off of it and they're

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both internally designed ones and commercially available ones i see some

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storage cards i see what looks like

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well i see more storage cards actually i don't recognize most of them then up

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here is the brains this thing is really cool typically what

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the engineer would do is they would plug this port here into the motherboard and

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then they connect anything they want to all of these ports up here and

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everything else is remotely configurable through software so you want to change

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from usb to Thunderbolt mode done

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want to connect this guy right here specifically

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easy how about this one and this one no

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problem what if you want to simulate the effects of someone plugging in and

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unplugging a device a thousand times

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well you could make your new hires do it or if you're Intel you could create a

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robot for that but the lab folks are all about working smarter not harder right

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guys yeah yeah that's what i thought now of course the main point of this kind of

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automation is to allow the text to run a much broader array of configurations and

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much more quickly which you need because the real world is full of scenarios that

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are far more challenging than plugging in and unplugging a device from a

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powered system like let's say a machine goes to sleep with one device

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and then wakes up with another like you're at work plugged into your usb

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dock you shut the lid on your laptop unplug throw it in your bag go home then

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you plug in an external display and fire up your machine

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well the system has to be able to figure out what the heck just happened and who it

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just woke up with i call this one the hangover scenario

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what do you think is that nickname gonna stick

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of course you guys might have noticed i talked about displays but we're not

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actually plugged into any type c displays

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that is where this little guy comes in

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welcome to times square get it because there's displays

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everywhere so clearly they do have parts in the lab that are dedicated to display

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testing full of all kinds of different monitors so they can ensure that you

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don't get flicker on a high resolution monitor when you plug in the onboard GPU

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for example but for what i think are fairly obvious

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reasons it's not practical to fill the whole lab with 65-inch tvs just so you

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can make sure that HDMI 2.1 works over on your usb test bench right so what

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they do is they use this little dongle called the dock

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d-o-k and what it does is it rips the edit

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information off of any display the e-did

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is kind of like the identifier of that particular model that reports its

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capabilities back to the connected device then what it does is it emulates it

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making your device think that that monitor is connected

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definitely a space saver there are some

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areas where you just can't take shortcuts though

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part of silicon behavior is influenced by its thermal environment so part of

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their testing methodology is of course to alter that environment i call this

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guy the thermal doodad and honestly

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i don't know much about it because the expert on this didn't happen to be here

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but what i do know is that it's a hydropneumatic cooling system which

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means other than that those words mean water

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and air i'm not sure and you can actually see

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that it's hooked up to the building's supply of both water and air i mean it's

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no LTT Store.com water bottle but i guess it's pretty cool

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and the control panel over here can either be adjusted manually or remotely

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and it'll actually change the parameters of the Intel control mechanism which is

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over here behind the test bench so this guy can raise and lower coolant

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temperatures on command allowing the techs to simulate a wide variety of

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different real world use cases let's say you turn on your machine outside on a

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freezing cold day so they've got to have the CPU be able to start cold and then

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get hot or maybe you take your machine out of the sweltering heat into an

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air-conditioned room well they've got to build a profile for the silicon's

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behavior under those conditions too and the thermal head

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that is such a boring engineer name by the way guys i'm gonna stick with the the doodad

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allows them to do just that which surely makes you wonder

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what do they do when they find these kinds of problems that must exist in the

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hardware i mean most of the chips in the validation lab here are going to be es1

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or es2 not final specs so bugs and

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undesirable behavior are part of the territory i am so glad you asked because

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i saved one of the coolest parts of the full tour for this follow-up video and

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we're gonna run down right now to the debug lab

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wait experts showed up ah okay so the red tubes are carrying water that could

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be as cold as like below zero okay way below the ambient

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temperature in this room so the air in the blue tubes here is actually to blow

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around the CPU socket and prevent any ice from forming or condensation or

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anything like that when they're going well below ambient temperature

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super cool okay now we're leaving when you need to dig as deep as possible

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into the silicon the debug lab is the place to go why

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because it's the home of the lada the laser assisted

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device alteration i don't remember that the name is not what's important what

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matters is how freaking cool this thing is it fires high powered lasers into the

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silicon like into the pnp junction so you can actually change the properties

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of the chip say for example you want to change the timing of an individual

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transistor or the voltage required to open it if the engineers want to see how

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the chip will behave in a way that's different from how they originally

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designed and fabbed it this can do it

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what like this bears repeating because it's basically science fiction you take a

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chip that's already fabbed you fire a

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freaking laser beam into it and it acts differently allowing you to test the

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outcome of a potential design change before you fab a whole new design

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absolutely unreal this next one's almost as fun

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unfortunately i'm not quite allowed to show it to you so we've got a wall of

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Intel employees in front of it but i'll describe it the irem is kind of like a

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flear thermal camera but for electrical activity so you want to see a gate open

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or close you want to monitor the activity of that gate when i say gate

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i'm talking about a single individual transistor one of billions on a chip

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like alder lake this is where you do it so the engineers

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can get these images of how the gates behave allowing them to say take an

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issue that comes up in the validation lab isolate it sometimes to the

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transitory that's problematic then fix it and move on with the debug and get

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closer to delivery and after everything we've seen i think the thing that blows

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my mind the most is that Intel has spent so many years talking about anything

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other than how cool this stuff is in my humble opinion their biggest pr

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problem is that they've let business people do too much of the talking while

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the gear heads have been quite literally locked away in the basement

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but i'm hoping that after these videos go up those days will be firmly behind

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us i mean honestly i don't see it going down any other way because literally

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every single person i met here was so enthusiastic and passionate about what

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they do that it's it's infectious i mean take dennis my camera operator he

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doesn't give too hot it's about cpus and he still managed to have a blast in this

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place the pride that these folks take in their work is inspiring and it's absolutely

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justified i mean in spite of the challenges of covet 19 they managed to

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hit their delivery estimate on alder lake to the week that they predicted

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it's mind-blowing especially now that you've seen all the steps involved am i

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right just like my sponsor segways blow your mind i fix it you break it i fix it

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not me of course but i fix it moire and minnow kits are the tool kits for the

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tinkerer on the go the pocket size minnow driver kit is only 14.99 with an

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easy to open magnetized case a built-in sorting tray 16 different bits and a

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handle with a built-in e-sim eject tool pretty fancy for something slightly

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bigger and longer the more a driver kit is only 1999 and comes with 32 different

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bits with extended reach next for digging into those hard-to-reach nooks

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and crannies and all ifixit kits come with a lifetime warranty as well so

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you're sure to end up in a landfill somewhere before your ifixit kit does so

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check out our links in the description to get yours today if you guys enjoyed this video all i got to do is point you

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to some of the other videos we've done maybe the fab tour go check it out it's

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gonna blow your mind