Awesome Information guides thanks. Anything else you would recommend?
On architectures? Or fabs...
For CPU microarchitecture, start with the
Wikipedia article. Follow the links. After that you should have a basic grasp of the concepts.
If you want to delve deeper into the topic, be aware that it will be a long journey; modern CPUs are extremely complex beasts, understanding them is not easy - just so that you are prepared.
A good source of information about individual modern CPUs can be gotten from the CPU articles here at AnandTech and on
Real World Technologies.
The moderated forums at RWT are also very good, if you keep searching for interesting threads, you can learn a lot (just as with these forums). You'll probably understand very little of the advanced topics initially, but that will pass with time.
For detailed information on current CPUs, AMDs and Intels documentation is very useful. The CPU documentation is usually contained in the "Software Optimization Guides"; Intel has general guides where one PDF covers a few recent generations, AMD has specific guides for the different CPU families. Just search their websites or use Google to locate the current versions of these manuals. Manuals for older architectures are generally not hosted on the AMD/Intel websites, so you'll have to employ some Google-Fu to locate them.
A good companion to AMDs/Intels docs are are Agner Fogs
Software Optimization manuals, you'll only want the microarchitecture manual though (unless you plan on becoming a low-level programmer). Agner covers all important recent architectures, and the manual is a good compact reference; especially useful for comparisons, because the information covering different CPUs is written by the same person, so you'll get a more uniform usage of specific terms than in manuals from different companies. It also contains information about the Via Nano, which is otherwise nearly impossible to get by.
More comprehensive introductions to the general concepts of CPU architecture can be found in the following two books:
Jon Stokes: Inside the Machine
Hennessy & Patterson: Computer Architecure: A Quantitative Approach
I'd recommend the book by Jon Stokes for beginners, as he has a more practical way of explaining and illustrating things; Computer Architecture is the more scientific work.
The
Intel Technology Journal covers all kinds of things Intel is doing, among the articles are a few covering process development problems and CPU design challenges. There are only a few article of this kind, but they have interesting information which you probably won't get anywhere else.
And for people interested in the low-level workings of computers, the classic is "
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. It covers the concepts of low-level logic on which CPUs are based and explains all the basic concepts and components of CPU design. You'll be able to fully understand the design and implementation of simple 8-bit CPUs after reading this book. This knowledge doesn't really help in understanding modern CPU architectures (they're too complex for the low-level stuff to matter except for the CPU designers), but if you're interested in the basics of digital logic, it is an excellent read.