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phiretoday at 12:22 AM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

userbinatortoday at 6:04 AM

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...

xpcttoday at 7:22 AM

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.

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