CPU design is a complex process that involves setting priorities and goals, integrating an instruction set, designing the physical hardware, and ensuring the chip can be manufactured effectively. Designers aim to create CPUs that are faster, cheaper, more energy-efficient, or perform better with certain processes.
Central processing unit (CPU) design is the design of an important aspect of a computer. The design is usually done by a computer designer who specializes in CPUs. In general, the first step of CPU design is to decide what the design priorities are and what goals are to be achieved with the CPU. Designing a new CPU can take up to five years, sometimes longer, and the total cost of the design period can range into the tens of millions of United States dollars (USD). These costs vary depending on the type of CPU, which can range from high-performance CPUs to low-end CPUs for embedded devices and general-purpose models.
Some areas of CPU design always need to be addressed, including integrating an instruction set that programmers can use. Without an instruction set, programmers are unable to develop programs that run on a computer using a given CPU. The instruction set specifies a lot of basic information, like how to read and write data and where specific things like memory are located.
Another integral part of CPU design is designing the physical representation of the hardware. Since designing a CPU is a complicated and time-consuming process, it is usually necessary to use a computer simulator to visualize all the prototyped hardware. In most cases, many CPU designers work together on this aspect of CPU design.
One of the final steps of CPU design is called design rule checking. The purpose of this process is to ensure that the CPU design meets the technical rules used to ensure that the chip is manufactured effectively. Manufacturing is not a perfect process, so there are typically imprecise variables and actions. A chip design must be able to tolerate some errors during production, but still function correctly.
There are a few common design goals when designing a new CPU, and there is often more than one goal for any given CPU. Sometimes a designer wants to make a CPU that can do more with less. The goal may not be to make a CPU that is much faster than existing designs, but to produce a certain standard that is cheaper or more energy efficient. In other cases, the goal may actually be to build a faster CPU regardless of cost or power consumption. Another type of design goal might be to create a CPU that performs better when used in parallel processing or more efficiently with certain types of processes.
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