Inside the CPU: a step-by-step breakdown, from the package to the IOMMU

Inside the CPU

One box on the board, a city inside.

On the motherboard the CPU looks like one chip. Open it: a lid, a few silicon dies, cores with caches, and an IO die that holds the memory controllers and the IOMMU (both drawn apart from the CPU box here for clarity), which translates and checks the memory addresses that devices use for DMA (direct memory access). Scroll to take it apart, or pick where a load finds its data.