Polycloud 2024 - Designing, Implementing and Manufacturing a Microprocessor for the Cloud

The Soul of a Machine: Designing, Implementing and Manufacturing a Microprocessor for the Cloud, par Samuel Ortiz.

The cloud, and indirectly our lives, is powered by the most sophisticated machines human beings have ever built: Microprocessors.

In order to satisfy the exponentially growing demand for computing power, the complexity of those systems has significantly increased over the past few years.
With the advent of AI workloads running in the cloud, the demand for new and custom hardware architectures has never been so high, making the process of building new microprocessors and System-on-Chip (SoC) a true human and technological odyssey.

In this presentation we will describe what it takes to design, implement, validate and manufacture a microprocessor that can meet today’s cloud user demands.

At first we will attempt to grasp the level of complexity of a modern cloud SoC design. We will then briefly dive into Hardware Description Languages (HDL) and see how they are used to implement such designs, in conjunction with the black magic of pre-silicon validation tools.
Transforming this code into an electronically-powered piece of sand is what we will describe next, before staring at the art of debugging a freshly baked network of billions of transistors.