Delidded Intel I9-14900KS CT Scan (lttlabs.com)
106 points by willx86 4 days ago
rylando 34 minutes ago
How neat! Would be cool to see the side by sides of equivalent tier CPU’s throughout the generations
lathiat 7 hours ago
LTT Labs are writing up a lot of nice content of late.
fishgoesblub 6 hours 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.
newsclues 14 minutes ago
The author of the linked article is Lucas...
rylando 35 minutes ago
I wonder why? Genuinely, not sarcastically
phire 10 hours 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 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 44 minutes 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.