As everything in James Cameron's movies, even such seemingly trivial items like the Terminator chip had a lot of thought put behind it, and few designers to come up with the finished look. The basis for its look was in real life science, and Cameron wanted someone who was actually in the field of neural networking to consult the design. That someone was Larry Yaeger, principal engineer in Apple programs, whose background includes computational fluid dynamics, computer graphic imaging and, most importantly - neural network research.
Yaeger himself wrote an essay on multiple subjects for 2000's Terminator 2: Judgment Day Ultimate DVD release, and since this DVD and its vast majority of its material has been out of print for decades, I may show some excerpts from Yaeger's writing, which is so interesting it would have been a pity if it got lost in time buried in DVD extras that were never rereleased on other formats.
One of the first things he talks about is how he got drafted into being a science consultant on the film, and that his main contribution, other than making sure everything is scientifically plausible and correct, is the overall design of Terminator's CPU chip and the large model seen in Cyberdyne and Dyson's house, with all the research on neural networking in mind.
For anyone interested, Yaeger explains first what Neural Networking is and how it works in nearly 30 pages in the document. Again, the full thing can be found among the insane amount of extras on 2000's Ultimate DVD release. It is very interesting, and directly related to the chip design.
He actually has a small cameo in T2 in Dyson's lab, and a small dialogue exchange with him. if you missed what they said to each other, or had no idea what or if it means something, he explains it
And finally, here Yaeger dives into an explanation on the design of the Neural Net Processor
Other topics covered is Skynet’s self awarness and the “read only” function on the CPU.
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