Intel is known for their high performance cores, which combine large out of order execution engines with high clock speeds to maximize single threaded performance. But Intel also has the “Atom” line of architectures, which are designed to make different power…

We at Chips and Cheese have covered two Chinese CPU architectures: Zhaoxin’s x86 compatible Lujiazui architecture found in the KX-6000 series of CPUs and Phytium’s ARM compatible FT663 architecture found in the D2000 series of CPUs. Zhaoxin was founded in…

The world of semiconductor startups looking to break into the market is huge, either with some large AI training chip, or some super fast small inference device, or perhaps a HPC focused design for one particular problem the world is trying to solve. A number…

Tech enthusiasts probably know ARM as a company that develops reasonably performant CPU architectures with a focus on power efficiency. Product lines like the Cortex A7xx and Cortex X series use well balanced, moderately sized out-of-order execution engines…

Author’s Note: Since the publication of this article, we have since had an interview with Tachyum and nearly all of the architectural analysis done in this article is outdated but it will be kept up for posterity. So please visit the new article for our revised…

Note: Jake has commented that Nvidia’s tools may not show the true BVH structure. That’s a distinct possibility, as the structure implied by Nsight is indeed ridiculously wide. The rest of the article will be left unedited (for now) due to time constraints…

In the world of today’s high performance CPUs, major architectural changes don’t happen often. Iterating off a proven base is safer, cheaper, and faster than attempting to massively rework the basics of how a CPU fetches and executes instructions. But more…

Alder Lake (ADL) is the most exciting Intel launch in more than half a decade. For the first time since Skylake, Intel has launched a competitive desktop microarchitecture. But I’m sure you all know that already from other sites that are able to do launch…

CPU design is hard. You can tell because there aren’t a lot of companies doing it. AMD and Intel are your only choices in the PC scene. In the Android ecosystem, ARM Ltd’s cores dominate. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung and other SoC makers put chips together…

Last year we posted an article about Milan’s V-cache performance where we dived into the bandwidth and latency performance of the then-latest innovation by AMD to increase performance of its CPUs. Now, we have already done an article about Zen 4’s V-Cache…

Compute performance has been held back by memory performance for decades, with DRAM performance falling even further behind with every year. Caches compensate for this by trying to keep frequently used data closer to the CPU core. As DRAM performance became…

Previously, we covered Tesla’s Dojo, an unconventional CPU architecture specifically designed for neural network training. We also looked at AMD’s CDNA2, a GPU architecture focused on high performance compute. Now, we’re going to look at Biren’s BR100, a…

Caching is important. We recently got a subset of our test suite run on an engineering example of Raptor Lake. Those results let us take a look at Intel’s changes to their caching hierarchy. Because clock speeds won’t be final on an engineering sample, we’ll…

In our last article, we examined Centaur’s CNS architecture. Centaur had a long history as a third x86 CPU designer, and CNS was the last CPU architecture Centaur had in the works before they were bought by Intel. In this article, we’ll take a look at Centaur…

Last year, Intel’s Golden Cove brought the company back to competitive against AMD. Unfortunately for Intel, that only applied to the client space. AMD’s Rome and Milan CPUs have steadily eroded Intel’s server dominance. With the bulk of recently added systems…

Like CPUs, modern GPUs have evolved to use complex, multi level cache hierarchies. Integrated GPUs are no exception. In fact, they’re a special case because they share a memory bus with CPU cores. The iGPU has to contend with CPUs for limited memory bandwidth…

Recently, a ransomware group leaked data from Gigabyte in an attempt to extort payment. That’s been well covered by other outlets (please everyone, secure your networks), so here we’re focusing on Zen 4 technical details from the leak. Sadly there’s not a…

Two decades ago, AMD’s K8 architecture went head to head against Intel’s best. But unlike the “Zen versus something-lake” situation today, the K8 versus Netburst situation is particularly interesting because the two cores took vastly different approaches…

Intel’s Arc GPUs represent the company’s third attempt at taking on the dedicated GPU market. The company’s first attempt, the i740, tried to use the then-new AGP interface to store textures in system memory. In theory, the i740 could get by with less onboard…

In Part 1, we looked at Bulldozer’s core architecture. But the architecture itself isn’t the full story. Memory advances have not kept up with CPU speed, so modern CPUs cope with increasingly sophisticated caching setups. They have to cope with cache latency…