in an absolutely unprecedented move Intel has given me access to the
engineers in their soc validation lab
wow that is so cool i absolutely love it okay gotta go bye
this is an opportunity to talk to some of the smartest people in the world
so i immediately did what anyone would do i asked them
what came first the chicken or the egg
that's simple you must build both the chicken and an egg in parallel to make
sure they're compatible with each other an
unconventional answer but one that makes sense when you consider the cutting edge
work that they do inside these walls take pci express gen 5 for example
how can you build a compatible CPU and motherboard when there are no devices to
test them with well you create one from scratch
so cool just like i created this segway to our
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i was so blown away by the insane gear
that they have in the validation lab when i was shooting my general tour of
the israel development center that i immediately cancelled my return flight
so that i could come back another day and get you guys a closer look at it
this lab's goal is twofold first they need to test every possible function of
the soc from logic to memory to
integrated GPU to connectivity and second they need to test at scale to
ensure that their results are going to be applicable across thousands hundreds
of thousands or even millions of units of processors because it's the nature of
the silicon business that there's going to be a spectrum of behavior from the
silicon parts and you've got a test at scale to ensure that this whole spectrum
is validated that's why this place is absolutely packed to the gills with test
benches most of the ones we're looking at in here have the same core components a
12th gen alder light processor on top of one of Intel's rvp or reference
validation platform motherboards which man these things include some really
cool functionality for like remote control and testing and all kinds of
stuff i'm actually planning another follow-up video focusing just on this
bad boy including a look at the liquid nitrogen cooled board that they've got
in the overclocking lab so get subscribed to make sure you don't miss it
beyond the base platform though there is a broad spectrum of different functions
that the lab might want to look at that require different specialized equipment
so let's start over here pci express gen 5 is one of the key
selling points of 12th gen an Intel knew going into it that they were going to be
well ahead of any consumer need for this kind of bandwidth it's twice as fast as
gen 4 lane for lane and even ahead of market availability of any compatible
devices but they did it anyway because there are advantages to being the market
leader on new technologies not only does this kind of future compatibility give
Intel a valuable marketing bullet point for their platform but it's also very
likely that as NVIDIA or even AMD are developing their next-gen pci express
gen 5 gpus that they're going to end up using Intel's alder lake platform for
their own internal validation making it much more likely that any early quirks
are going to be accounted for before those products ship to consumers
of course living on the bleeding edge like that means that you've got to get
creative sometimes okay this is a bit of an aside but this
is my first hands-on with a pci express gen 5 device i mean not just me this is
almost anyone's first hand on with the pci express gen 5 device this is so cool
and immediately there are some noticeable physical changes compared to
pci express gen 4. for example in gen 4
here at the front of the connector only the presence pins were shorter so these
tell the motherboard that there's a device installed but in gen 5 the
presence pins and the power pins are shorter as well and this seems to be a
result of what we've learned about hot plugging from years of Thunderbolt and
NVMe storage devices so this change
ensures that all the data connections are complete before the board powers up
there are also some obvious changes to the data pin layout presumably to
improve signal integrity because when we double our speed it means that we are
far more sensitive to signaling issues you can actually see more detail about
this in our HDMI cable tester video showing how the eye works and
what happens if the eye gets too small you must be thinking though
okay cool card but what does it do
the answer is nothing but also
everything there's no GPU or storage or
network controller on here nothing like that the card is non-functioning in that
sense but what it does do is generate and monitor traffic or errors and it can
do so at every layer link physical
transactional giving Intel's engineers almost full control of what they want to
do with it most of these functions can be programmed in band so that is to say
over the pci express bus and then the test can be executed but some of them
are actually handled with dip switches that can do things like limit the speed
the pci express generation the card runs at uh limit the number of lanes that are
available i mean obviously you don't want to go build a whole bunch of
different physical cards for 1x 4x 8x
and 16x right another thing you don't want to build is custom silicon every
time you find a hardware bug that's why this card uses a field programmable gate
array or an fpga fpgas are prohibitively expensive
compared to asics or normal computer chips so you'll only rarely see them in
consumer products apple's afterburner accelerator card is an example but when
you're developing a product that is meant to follow a specification that
ain't finalized yet fpgas are a must
because like it says in the name rather than being locked into a particular
configuration they're actually hardware reprogrammable in the field allowing the
engineers to make changes to the chip to address any shortcomings without wasting
months designing and manufacturing a new asic every single time
now i asked about the 8-pin power connector here and it turns out that
it's not actually a requirement for the onboard fpga but rather it's there to
validate external power functionality and as for the RAM slot they were
extremely cagey about the RAM slot something something another mode we
don't use i had kind of hoped it was for something
like testing throughput to a known high bandwidth device or something like that
but Intel has super high performance fpgas
so obviously they're using their own so they wouldn't really need that
i don't know this is really cool one of the big
validation challenges today is usb type-c with all the different power
envelopes and protocols DisplayPort native usb Thunderbolt not to mention
daisy chaining with the latter we've reached a point of exponential possible
configuration growth to the point where it is
practically speaking impossible to test every single combination but if you've
got one of these you can do an awful lot it doesn't
really have a name but this usbc test
rig is super cool each one of these wings hanging off of
the test bench here has a variety of devices hanging off of it and they're
both internally designed ones and commercially available ones i see some
storage cards i see what looks like
well i see more storage cards actually i don't recognize most of them then up
here is the brains this thing is really cool typically what
the engineer would do is they would plug this port here into the motherboard and
then they connect anything they want to all of these ports up here and
everything else is remotely configurable through software so you want to change
from usb to Thunderbolt mode done
want to connect this guy right here specifically
easy how about this one and this one no
problem what if you want to simulate the effects of someone plugging in and
unplugging a device a thousand times
well you could make your new hires do it or if you're Intel you could create a
robot for that but the lab folks are all about working smarter not harder right
guys yeah yeah that's what i thought now of course the main point of this kind of
automation is to allow the text to run a much broader array of configurations and
much more quickly which you need because the real world is full of scenarios that
are far more challenging than plugging in and unplugging a device from a
powered system like let's say a machine goes to sleep with one device
and then wakes up with another like you're at work plugged into your usb
dock you shut the lid on your laptop unplug throw it in your bag go home then
you plug in an external display and fire up your machine
well the system has to be able to figure out what the heck just happened and who it
just woke up with i call this one the hangover scenario
what do you think is that nickname gonna stick
of course you guys might have noticed i talked about displays but we're not
actually plugged into any type c displays
that is where this little guy comes in
welcome to times square get it because there's displays
everywhere so clearly they do have parts in the lab that are dedicated to display
testing full of all kinds of different monitors so they can ensure that you
don't get flicker on a high resolution monitor when you plug in the onboard GPU
for example but for what i think are fairly obvious
reasons it's not practical to fill the whole lab with 65-inch tvs just so you
can make sure that HDMI 2.1 works over on your usb test bench right so what
they do is they use this little dongle called the dock
d-o-k and what it does is it rips the edit
information off of any display the e-did
is kind of like the identifier of that particular model that reports its
capabilities back to the connected device then what it does is it emulates it
making your device think that that monitor is connected
definitely a space saver there are some
areas where you just can't take shortcuts though
part of silicon behavior is influenced by its thermal environment so part of
their testing methodology is of course to alter that environment i call this
guy the thermal doodad and honestly
i don't know much about it because the expert on this didn't happen to be here
but what i do know is that it's a hydropneumatic cooling system which
means other than that those words mean water
and air i'm not sure and you can actually see
that it's hooked up to the building's supply of both water and air i mean it's
no LTT Store.com water bottle but i guess it's pretty cool
and the control panel over here can either be adjusted manually or remotely
and it'll actually change the parameters of the Intel control mechanism which is
over here behind the test bench so this guy can raise and lower coolant
temperatures on command allowing the techs to simulate a wide variety of
different real world use cases let's say you turn on your machine outside on a
freezing cold day so they've got to have the CPU be able to start cold and then
get hot or maybe you take your machine out of the sweltering heat into an
air-conditioned room well they've got to build a profile for the silicon's
behavior under those conditions too and the thermal head
that is such a boring engineer name by the way guys i'm gonna stick with the the doodad
allows them to do just that which surely makes you wonder
what do they do when they find these kinds of problems that must exist in the
hardware i mean most of the chips in the validation lab here are going to be es1
or es2 not final specs so bugs and
undesirable behavior are part of the territory i am so glad you asked because
i saved one of the coolest parts of the full tour for this follow-up video and
we're gonna run down right now to the debug lab
wait experts showed up ah okay so the red tubes are carrying water that could
be as cold as like below zero okay way below the ambient
temperature in this room so the air in the blue tubes here is actually to blow
around the CPU socket and prevent any ice from forming or condensation or
anything like that when they're going well below ambient temperature
super cool okay now we're leaving when you need to dig as deep as possible
into the silicon the debug lab is the place to go why
because it's the home of the lada the laser assisted
device alteration i don't remember that the name is not what's important what
matters is how freaking cool this thing is it fires high powered lasers into the
silicon like into the pnp junction so you can actually change the properties
of the chip say for example you want to change the timing of an individual
transistor or the voltage required to open it if the engineers want to see how
the chip will behave in a way that's different from how they originally
designed and fabbed it this can do it
what like this bears repeating because it's basically science fiction you take a
chip that's already fabbed you fire a
freaking laser beam into it and it acts differently allowing you to test the
outcome of a potential design change before you fab a whole new design
absolutely unreal this next one's almost as fun
unfortunately i'm not quite allowed to show it to you so we've got a wall of
Intel employees in front of it but i'll describe it the irem is kind of like a
flear thermal camera but for electrical activity so you want to see a gate open
or close you want to monitor the activity of that gate when i say gate
i'm talking about a single individual transistor one of billions on a chip
like alder lake this is where you do it so the engineers
can get these images of how the gates behave allowing them to say take an
issue that comes up in the validation lab isolate it sometimes to the
transitory that's problematic then fix it and move on with the debug and get
closer to delivery and after everything we've seen i think the thing that blows
my mind the most is that Intel has spent so many years talking about anything
other than how cool this stuff is in my humble opinion their biggest pr
problem is that they've let business people do too much of the talking while
the gear heads have been quite literally locked away in the basement
but i'm hoping that after these videos go up those days will be firmly behind
us i mean honestly i don't see it going down any other way because literally
every single person i met here was so enthusiastic and passionate about what
they do that it's it's infectious i mean take dennis my camera operator he
doesn't give too hot it's about cpus and he still managed to have a blast in this
place the pride that these folks take in their work is inspiring and it's absolutely
justified i mean in spite of the challenges of covet 19 they managed to
hit their delivery estimate on alder lake to the week that they predicted
it's mind-blowing especially now that you've seen all the steps involved am i
right just like my sponsor segways blow your mind i fix it you break it i fix it
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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
to some of the other videos we've done maybe the fab tour go check it out it's
gonna blow your mind