Today we’ll look at Intel’s Tremont architecture to put Gracemont in perspective. It’s Gracemont’s direct ancestor, and represents a shift in Intel’s Atom strategy. It delivers a massive 30% performance-per-clock jump – at least according to Intel – over…

Processor speed has rapidly outpaced advances in DRAM technology, so caching strategy is a huge part of CPU performance today. A couple of articles ago, we saw Intel’s decisions with Golden Cove’s high latency, high bandwidth cache setup. Could they have…

This is going the be the first in a series of articles on CPU architectures. We’re picking up where Real World Tech left off with its microarchitecture deep dives. And we’re going to be doing them with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, and hardware to test…

Intel debuted Skylake in 2015. Then Skylake variants filled out major parts of Intel’s lineup for the next six years. Skylake faced no serious competition at launch, but wound up holding the line against three generations of AMD’s Zen CPUs while Intel struggled…

This article can be considered a part 2 to our Golden Cove article because today we are looking at the other core in Alder Lake, Gracemont. Which is in my opinion more interesting than Golden Cove because, spoiler alert, it’s not a little core in the slightest.…

AMD’s Zen 4 architecture has been hotly anticipated by many in the tech sphere; as a result many rumors were floating around about its performance gains prior to its release. In February 2021 we published an article that claimed a 29% IPC increase for Zen…

China has been investing heavily into homegrown microprocessors for the past few years. Phytium’s D2000 is one example of a homegrown design, and we’ll be taking a close look at it in this article. Phytium D2000 consists of eight FTC663 ARM cores running…

In a previous article, we covered Cyberpunk 2077’s “Overdrive” raytracing mode. Rasterization and raytracing are both parallelizable, but raytracing tends to be less predictable. That makes it difficult for GPUs to bring their full parallel processing power…

Please go through part 1 of our Zen 4 coverage, if you haven’t done so already. This article picks up where the previous one left off. To summarize, Zen 4 has made several moves in the frontend and execution engine meant to increase utilization of existing…

AMD’s K7 Athlon architecture formed the basis of the company’s CPU offerings for around a decade. Athlon did very well against Intel’s P6 based Pentium III. K8 got the basics right, introduced 64-bit support and an integrated memory controller. And remained…

Hardware raytracing acceleration has come a long way since Nvidia’s Turing first introduced the technology. Even with these hardware advances, raytracing is so expensive that most games have stuck to very limited raytracing effects, if raytracing is used…

In late May of 2022, AWS released Graviton 3 to the general public. Graviton 3 was the first ARM CPU to introduce the SVE instruction set to a widely accessible server CPU. Before Graviton 3’s general availability, Neoverse N1 dominated the ARM server landscape.…

ARM Ltd has been dominating the Android world for the better part of the last decade, with their 7-series cores at the forefront of their success. Throughout the late 2010s, the Cortex A73, A75, and A76 steadily iterated on performance while maintaining excellent…

Palm Cove (also commonly known as Cannon Lake) is Intel’s 10 nm die shrink of the Skylake core. In Intel’s “Tick Tock” strategy of alternating major microarchitecture changes and ports to new process nodes, Palm Cove was meant to be the “Tick” following Skylake.…

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…