Delidded Intel I9-14900KS CT Scan

(lttlabs.com)

124 points | by willx86 8 days ago

3 comments

  • lathiat 5 days ago
    LTT Labs are writing up a lot of nice content of late.
    • fishgoesblub 5 days ago
      Sadly posts from one of their employees, Lucas, are auto-dead and don't get seen which is sad given their effort and quality.
      • LabsLucas 2 days ago
        I have been curious about this, since I posted the delidded i9-14900(really interesting), but it got very little attention. I am a regular user/reader of hackernews, but not sure how they would verify that since I don't comment.

        I appreciate you see the effort put into these by not just me but whole team here, I'll have to see if there is a way to get un-muted since these aren't low effort or 'spam-y' self-promotion posts in my opinion.

      • newsclues 4 days ago
        The author of the linked article is Lucas...
        • tecleandor 4 days ago
          I think he means that, when Lucas sends himself the link to HN, it's autodead. If you click the domain, you see all submissions from LucasLabs are dead.
      • rylando 5 days ago
        I wonder why? Genuinely, not sarcastically
  • phire 5 days ago
    I was not expecting the CT scan to be able to identify the cores within the die.

    But now I think about it, the metal layers (especially traces carrying power) are probably think enough, and different enough to show up. And even just power distribution is enough for the shape of the cores to be visible.

    • userbinator 5 days ago
      You don't even need a CT to identify the cores; they are already quite obvious in regular die photos as repeated areas.

      https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intel_Core_i9-13900K...

    • xpct 5 days ago
      You can typically see the L1/L2 SRAM cache regions just by looking for continuous patterns, then try to divide it into the number of cores or core groups you're looking for.
      • jaen 5 days ago
        This is only applicable to die photographs of the silicon layer.

        For CT scans, which use X-rays, the visible structure is very likely due to the metallic (copper) interconnect, clock- and power-delivery layers, which are generally quite different from the underlying transistors.

        These layers are larger-scale, and copper also absorbs X-rays much more strongly than silicon.

        • xpct 5 days ago
          Ah, I see. Thank you for the correction.
  • rylando 5 days ago
    How neat! Would be cool to see the side by sides of equivalent tier CPU’s throughout the generations