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Comparing Crestmonts: No L3 Hurts
Meteor Lake’s standard E-Cores share a 24 MB L3 cache with the P-Cores, while the LPE-Cores have to make do with just their private 2 MB L2. Caching is critical to performance in modern CPUs because...
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Update on Meteor Lake DRAM Latency Measurements
Chip makers are always looking to save power, especially in mobile devices. Like a CPU core, Meteor Lake’s memory controller can enter lower power states with reduced clocks and voltages. I’m testing...
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Thoughts on Skymont Slides
Recently a set of Skymont slides were published, apparently without any embargo or confidentiality marks. I have no proof that the slides are genuine. However, I think they’re worth analyzing because...
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Intel’s Lion Cove Architecture Preview
Intel’s P-Core’s lineage can be traced all the way back to the P6 architecture that was originally found in the Pentium Pro. From the Pentium Pro to Pentium III to Sandy Bridge to Golden Cove, Intel’s...
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Tracing Intel’s Atom Journey: Goldmont Plus
Today Intel’s Atom line occupies a prominent place in Intel’s best client chips. Atom cores are also going into Intel’s upcoming Sierra Forest server CPU, where they’ll similarly aim to deliver area...
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Intel Details Skymont
Previously Intel’s Skymont slides were published in low resolution, and I wrote a short article on them. Now, the presentation is public with higher resolution slides and presenter audio. Because...
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Testing AMD’s Bergamo: Zen 4c Spam
Server CPUs have pushed high core counts for a long time, though they way they got high core counts has varied. Bergamo is AMD’s move to increase core counts beyond what scaling up an interconnect can...
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Testing AMD’s Giant MI300X
AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI300X is the latest in the company’s compute focused CDNA line. NVIDIA has dominated the GPU compute market for time immemorial, thanks to a combination of strong compute GPUs...
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Examining the Nintendo Switch (Tegra X1) Video Engine
The Tegra X1 SoC featured in Nintendo’s Switch was meant to fill a variety of market segments including Android set top boxes and automotive applications. Hardware video encode and decode are vital to...
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The Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno iGPU
Qualcomm is no stranger to integrated graphics. Their Adreno GPU line has served through many generations of Snapdragon cell phone SoCs. But Qualcomm was never content to stay within the cell phone...
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Inside the Snapdragon 855’s iGPU
Qualcomm’s Adreno 6xx architecture has been superseded Adreno 7xx, but it’s still used in countless devices, including the current-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Here, I’ll be looking at the Adreno 640 GPU...
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Correction on Qualcomm iGPUs
I wrote about Qualcomm iGPUs in three articles. All three were difficult because Qualcomm excels at publishing next to no information on their Adreno GPU architecture. Therefore, I went after Linux...
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Chips and Cheese State of the Union
In December of 2020, a group of friends came together to form Chips & Cheese. It started out as a simple outlet for our in-depth investigations into hardware but quickly turned into a much bigger...
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Meteor Lake’s E-Cores: Crestmont Makes Incremental Progress
Efficiency cores, or E-Cores for short, sit front and center in Intel’s consumer CPU strategy. The company introduced E-Cores to its mainstream lineup in Alder Lake, where they sat alongside higher...
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Qualcomm’s Oryon LLVM Patches
In October of 2023, Qualcomm announced its newest Laptop SOC lineup called the Snapdragon X Elite (SDXE). There has been a ton of excitement around this chip since then, due to it using a custom ARM...
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Qualcomm’s Oryon Core: A Long Time in the Making
In 2019, a startup called Nuvia came out of stealth mode. Nuvia was notable because its leadership included several notable chip architects, including one who used to work for Apple. Apple chips like...
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A Video Interview with Mike Clark, Chief Architect of Zen at AMD
Today’s “article” is a little bit different to what you readers are used to. This article is a transcript of our video interview I conducted with Mike Clark at AMD. This was my first video interview I...
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Arm’s Cortex A73: Resource Limits, What are Those?
Arm (the company) enjoyed plenty of design wins towards the mid 2010s. Their 32-bit Cortex designs scored wins in Nvidia’s Tegra 3 and Tegra 4. Samsung’s Exynos chips in the Galaxy S4 and S5 also used...
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Arm’s Neoverse V2, in AWS’s Graviton 4
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud provider, and an early Arm server adopter. AWS started investing into the Arm server ecosystem in 2018 with Graviton 1, which used 16 Cortex A72 cores....
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Zen 5’s 2-Ahead Branch Predictor Unit: How a 30 Year Old Idea Allows for New...
When I recently interviewed Mike Clark, he told me, “…you’ll see the actual foundational lift play out in the future on Zen 6, even though it was really Zen 5 that set the table for that.” And at that...
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Grace Hopper, Nvidia’s Halfway APU
Nvidia and AMD are the biggest players in the high performance GPU space. But while Nvidia has a huge GPU market share advantage over AMD, the latter’s CPU prowess makes it a strong competitor. AMD...
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Cortex A73’s Not-So-Infinite Reordering Capacity
Cortex A73 aimed to address the power and thermal issues that prevented Arm’s early 64-bit cores from reaching their full potential. It started a trend that saw Arm successfully capture the smartphone...
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AMD’s Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile
AMD’s Zen line has gone a long way since it brought AMD’s CPU efforts back from the dead. Successive Zen generations delivered steady improvements that made AMD an increasingly dangerous competitor to...
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AMD’s Ryzen 9950X: Zen 5 on Desktop
AMD’s desktop Zen 5 products, codenamed Granite Ridge, are the latest in the company’s line of high performance consumer offerings. Here, we’ll be looking at AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X. We already saw most...
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Zen 5 Variants and More, Clock for Clock
Zen 5 is AMD’s newest core architecture. Just a few weeks after launch, Zen 5 has already hit the market with several different cache, clock speed, and AVX-512 configurations. Here, I’m comparing Zen...
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AMD’s Radeon 890M: Strix Point’s Bigger iGPU
AMD’s iGPUs have seen plenty of recent success. Handheld gaming devices like Valve’s Steam Deck and Asus’s ROG Ally both use AMD integrated graphics. AMD’s last generation mobile offering, codenamed...
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Hot Chips 2024: Qualcomm’s Oryon Core
Today, Qualcomm is presenting on their Oryon core. We’ve covered this core previously in a separate article, so I’ll focus on new details or differences covered in the review. Snapdragon X Elite pin...
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Tesla’s TTPoE at Hot Chips 2024: Replacing TCP for Low Latency Applications
Last year at Hot Chips 2023, Tesla introduced their Dojo supercomputer. For Tesla, machine learning is focused on automotive applications like self driving cars. Training deals with video, which can...
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AmpereOne at Hot Chips 2024: Maximizing Density
Ampere Computing focuses on developing cloud-native processors, and aims to serve many users while providing security, privacy, and consistent performance, without relying on process node scaling....
View ArticleAn Interview with Intel’s Arik Gihon about Lunar Lake at Hot Chips 2024
For today’s article we have another video interview for you folks, this time with Arik Gihon from Intel where we talk about Lunar Lake. Before we get into the video and the transcript, I would just...
View ArticleAn Interview with Susan Eickoff and Christian Jacobi from IBM at Hot Chips 2024
This is our second video interview from Hot Chips 2024 and this time I got to sit down with Susan Eickoff and Christian Jacobi from IBM to talk about their brand new Telum II processor and Spyre AI...
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Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike any other...
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FuriosaAI’s RNGD at Hot Chips 2024: Accelerating AI with a More Flexible...
There were no shortage of AI accelerators at Hot Chips 2024. One of those was FuriosaAI’s RNGD, pronounced Renegade. It’s a 150W TDP chip with 48 GB of HBM3, and aims to handle inference at lower...
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Discussing AMD’s Zen 5 at Hot Chips 2024
Hot Chips isn’t just a conference where companies give in-depth presentations on the architectures behind high performance chips. It’s also a place to talk to the engineers who worked on those...
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Running SPEC CPU2017 at Chips and Cheese?
SPEC, or Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, maintains and publishes various benchmark suites that are often taken as an industry standard. Here, I’ll be looking at SPEC CPU2017, which...
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Intel’s Redwood Cove: Baby Steps are Still Steps
Intel’s Meteor Lake chip signaled a change in Intel’s mobile strategy, moving away from the monolithic designs that had characterized Intel’s client designs for more than a decade. But radical changes...
View ArticleIntel Granite Rapids: A Step in the Right Direction (Video)
Intel’s brand new Granite Rapids series of CPUs is launching today and in an attempt of trying some new types of content we recorded an off the cuff and first thoughts video during the event Intel had...
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Lion Cove: Intel’s P-Core Roars
Intel’s mobile CPUs have undergone massive changes over the past couple generations as Intel defends its laptop market against AMD, Qualcomm, and to a lesser extent Apple. Meteor Lake adopted...
View ArticleChips and Cheese Interviews Ronak Singhal
For today’s article we have another video interview for you folks, this time with Ronak Singhal from Intel where we talk about Granite Rapids AP. Before we get into the video and the transcript, I...
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Skymont: Intel’s E-Cores reach for the Sky
The 2020s were a fun time for Intel’s Atom line, which went from an afterthought to playing a major role across Intel’s high performance client offerings. Intel’s latest mobile chip, codenamed Lunar...
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