Posted 10/12/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Loyd Case

Designing and manufacturing a modern CPU is a huge project. It requires both backward compatibility and an understanding of where PC workloads are going in the future—a delicate balancing act made more difficult by the huge engineering staffs and massive dollar outlays involved. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to build a Core i7 or AMD Phenom II processor.

Before the manufacturing plant starts churning out chips, there are a few critical preliminary steps. Prior to the first circuit being laid out or the first simulation run, the designers need to know exactly what it is they’re designing. This phase takes input from many sources. Marketing gets involved, with predictions of what users will need when the CPU actually ships, usually two to four years in the future. Engineering and performance teams feed in billions of traces of actual applications being run on current-gen CPUs, so the designers can see how existing CPUs perform under real-world conditions.

Continue reading about the CPU production process after the jump.

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Posted 11/04/08 at 06:12:54 PM by Andy Salisbury

Apple has cut their Q4 iPhone production proposal drastically from what they had originally planned, according to a report by Freidman Billings Ramsey analyst Craig Berger. Having originally set out for a 10 percent drop, recent data suggests that production could drop more than 40 percent.

This data however, doesn’t necessarily reflect a significantly slowing iPhone demand. While the production is slowing down, iPhone shipments won’t be 40 percent lower.

Lowered production numbers could have a lot to do with the hurting economy, and the fact that Apple deliberately produced an excess of iPhones in Q3 to help provide some excess supply.

According to Berger, “…iPhone production plans are being revised lower suggests that the global [macroeconomic] weakness is impacting even high-end consumers, those that are more likely to buy Apple's expensive gadgets, and that no market segment will be spared in this global downturn. This is a negative signal for global demand, in our view.”

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