CPU core design

Hey everyone again!

Its been quite some time since I gave any new insight into the development, I've been working on the CPU designer, and didn't really have anything to show off, until now. Let's get into it!

So where I left off last time was the ISA version panel end extentions designer. Both of those are fully done now. After selecting the ISA version you want to use for your new CPU project and clicking Next tab, now you will get into the Chip layout designer, where you design the CPU chip(s) and support chips. The graphical part of this isn't done yet, so this is something I can't show for now, but it will let you decide what structures you want to integrate into your CPU chip, as time will advance, the less support chips will there be. You will be able to select what kind of bus is between the chips* and inside the main CPU chip, decide how many cores to have, later in the game, decide about cache sturctures, memory interface, IO and much more. Here you will be able to click on the core(s), and press "Core design", which will open a new panel. 

*This is something I teased before when talking about what the research team can do, and there was the "Technological Projects".  In such projects you will be able to design new IO and chip-to-chip interconnects.

Now you are looking at this new panel. Here you will be able to choose between every core design you designed or have access that can be used with the ISA you have chosen. Its empty right now as you can see, lets click the "Design a new one"! 

Now you are looking at the Core designer panel. Clicking Open list lets you open up the previous panel in the forground. The architecture you are looking at is extremely basic, as it was (and will be in the game) in the 1970's and early 1980's, where the performance uplift came from higher bits, better ISA optimizations, better buses and higher clocks, and not from pipelined and superscalar CPU cores, like it did later. This is a simple fetch-decode-execute machine. You will be able to design way more complex cores as the game progresses. Clicking on the Front End for example (these bars act as buttons too) will open up a panel with tons of different design decisions, where you will be able to add an instruction cache for example, or make a decoding stage, add a branch predictor and so on...

The panel is currently empty, its under development for now. And so is the whole designer panel, one of the if not the most complex panel in the whole game. It will take quite a bit more time to be finished, but that gets closer every day, so stay tuned!

Back on the panel where you choose between the different designs:

Each of these little tiles will have a miniature version of the design in the middle, have a logo and name of the designer company and a date.

This is all for this time, I hope you enjoyed looking into these things as much as I enjoyed creating them, I hope you have a nice day and week!