well a cpu with a 1GHz clock has 1nS to process data between flops - yes it's a bit like laying out microwave stuff -but in the very small - what happens is that it all starts with some layout person/people creating a standard cell library, they'll use spice to simulate and characterise their results - they'll pass this to the synthesis/layout tool makes a good first guess, they'll add in some fudge factor - then a timing tool looks at the 3d layout and extracts real timing, including parasitics to everything in 3-space around a wire - they check - does the timing from every flop to every other flop through every possible path meet both setup and hold times for the destination flop - if it does you're golden, tape it out - if not tweak something or resynthsise a block with tighter constraints etc etc

There is very complex delay analysis done - in all corners of the underlying fab process - automated layouts seldom look "pretty" at least from the point of hand done boards

Looking closely I see a bunch of ram - probably half laid out by hand (caches) - and a many may small standard cell blocks almost certainly not laid out by hand - what I don't see is an obviously hand laid out datapath (the first part of your CPU you spend layout engineers on) - look for that diagonal where the barrel shifter(s) would be. There are some very regular structures (8 vertically) that I suspect are register blocks.

Still what I see is probably someone managing timing by synthesizing small std cell blocks (not by hand), laying those blocks out by hand then letting their router hook them up on a second pass - - it's probably a great way to spend a little extra time guiding your tools into doing a better job to squeeze that extra 20% out of your timing budget and give you a greater gate density (and lower resulting wire delays)

So - a little bit of stuff being done by hand but almost all the gates being lait out by machine

oh yeah, like having two people who think you're a dork is better than one

I've worked as a logic monkey building CPUs in the past - this is SOP in our world - we'd boot linux on our hardware on the verilog simulator as part of our QA - 2 hours is nothing .....

It's not even a new idea 20 years ago I used to port Unix for a living (no linux yet), when the early RISCs came out they came with architectural simulators, while waiting for real silicon we'd spend the time bringing the kernel (and compiler) up

IR chaff - IR LED throwies are cheap compared to these bullets and will be brighter than any IR laser (that you can't actually feel as 'hot')

Oh no - you should purchase them .... but them return them because they don;t work with Linux

Jan 1st the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act came into effect - Apple didn't do this because of This American Life, they've been brought kicking and screaming to this point by the politicians and public opinion in general

Don't forget you're paying for all the people trying to break into your household - a friend here in NZ noticed he kept going over his paltry 1/2Gb cap - turned out 1/3 of his traffic was from other machines (mostly on the same ISP) trying to break into his.

I used to regularly buy a CD or two a week, but all the good local music stores have closed leaving chain stores full of pap - if I don't regularly browse I'm just not going to buy.

Sure I could buy on line but I really don't get the opportunity to find new stuff that interests me Pandora doesn't stream outside the US and besides buying from Amazon from outside the US is really expensive - and of course one can't buy from iTunes from a linux box because of Apple's lousy support

Years ago, in my first job out of college, i was tasked to do just this - I spent a day wandering around town looking in hardware stores - a lot of the old guys behind the counter would snigger and make a smart comment - it wasn't until the end of the day I realised that "do you have any small vices" might have another meaning ....

Just last month I found myself at the local big box hardware store looking for - you guessed it - looking for a small vice .... with a wonderfuil sense of deja-vu I got to pop the question - the young whipper-snapper there didn't even blink and took me to the aisle with the vices - kids these days, just oblivious

haha!

I've always been a big fan of recycling but recently I've realized that recycling newspaper is probably wrong - it drives down the cost of wood pulp at a time when we ought to be providing economic incentives for people to plant more trees. We're better off sequestering its carbon - down some old coal mines or the equivalent - yes I know there are issues with methane and land fills but I see those as being things that one can spend some money on researching technological solutions for not just a reason for rejecting the idea out of hand.

Well to be fair he's a nutter, part of a right wing party that seems to have jumped the shark at this point, he was the proponent of our '3 strikes' legislation - when this was announced in parliament today there were shouts of "strike two".

The main reason why the government started doing that in 2005 was because we had discovered that Israeli spies had been doing exactly that thing, getting fake NZ passports using the birth certificates of dead babies - the police went back through the records to hunt down any such passports, to cancel them to protect our citizens traveling abroad.

and now they announce the release of a new product with a funeral ....

Ah - that's the code to enable the deep cover Swartzenager operative ....