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A Core-i7 2600 has a die size of 216mm^2.[1] Assuming it's close to a square, that's about 14mm on each side. Electrical signals in a CPU travel almost at c, so at 3.4Ghz, signals can go across the die 6 times.

It's probably much less than that because paths in the CPU aren't straight lines. Also the i7 is a 4-core die, so it's unlikely that any signals need to go across the entire die in one clock. (Besides the clock signal, of course).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microproc...



Back when I took a VLSI class my professor showed an awesome animation of clock distribution at various frequencies. http://www.research.ibm.com/people/r/restle/Animations/DAC01...

Check out the animations under "Clock Distributions" (numbers 19 to 25. It shows how the propagation of the clock across the die is affected by frequency (When a part of the fabric/tree is up or down it represents 1 and 0 respectively).

My favorite is the SymTree and Non-Uniform SymTree (23 and 24) which shows how having a non uniform load at various parts of the chip and a fixed tree structure affects how long each part of the chip is at a 1 or 0 state (i.e. a low load part of the chip will spend more time at a stabilized 1 or 0, while a heavy capacitive load at one part can not even reach a true 1 or 0).


propagation of an electromagnetic field in copper is actually only 75% of c, it's a significant factor in processor speed




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