Intel sponsored or at least they tried to i've 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 i've ever seen before in my life that i would
have 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
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creating a CPU takes a really long time
from this wish list 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 going to work the blueprints get handed over to the fab to
produce a batch of es1 or alpha silicon that's going to take a few months due to
the incredible complexity of the fabrication process but that doesn't
mean they're going to 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 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 worked more than 24 hours in a day to do to get this to make it happen it's
really amazing i was even when my wife gave a birth with my little child it's
even more than that you would say that
once the most game-breaking 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 ciivt 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 on 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 alderley 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
this aisle is fondly nicknamed time square because it's full of all the
different kinds of screens that you might want to connect to your computer
high resolution high refresh rate HDMI
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 displayport 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
ltteststore.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 else is fixed 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 kind of like 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 sub-zero 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 like 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 i mean 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 want to
deliver a consistent experience you need way more data and robots like this one
can help you get it whether you want to 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 i mean they do everything from compute to communications to ai and
security here and if alder lake has anything to go on all that stuff that's
in development is going to be hecka exciting just like i'm excited to tell
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link in the video description 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