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Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation
Processor companies typically iterate off proven designs, and for good reason. Changing too many things at once introduces a lot of risk. A lot of changing parts makes it hard to get a good picture of...
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ARM’s Cortex A710: Winning by Default
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...
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ARM’s Neoverse N2: Cortex A710 for Servers
ARM’s Neoverse N1 was based on ARM’s Cortex A76 mobile core, but enhancements like instruction cache coherency and 48-bit physical addressing made it usable in servers. The result was quite successful...
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Correction for A710/Neoverse N2’s FP Scheduler Layout
As recent events have made clear, testing is hard. Determining a CPU’s scheduler layout involves a lot of testing, making mistakes likely. I made one such mistake for Cortex A710, which led to a block...
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Ivy Bridge’s Gen7 Graphics: Intel’s Modern iGPU Push
Intel has maintained an integrated graphics effort for a long time. The company’s integrated GPUs were not expected to do much beyond driving a display and offloading video decode. You could run games...
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Hot Chips 2023: Ventana’s Unconventional Veyron V1
The RISC-V scene has been heating up. SiFive’s designs have moved into higher power and performance envelopes. Alibaba’s T-HEAD division has been creating RISC-V chips in a bid to develop a viable...
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Hot Chips 2023: SiFive’s P870 Takes RISC-V Further
RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture, which means that anyone can create a core that understands RISC-V instructions without worrying about patents and licenses. SiFive is an important...
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Hot Chips 2023: Characterizing Gaming Workloads on Zen 4
AMD didn’t present a lot of new info about the Zen 4 core at their Hot Chips 2023 presentation. Uops.info has measured execution throughput and latency for instructions on Zen 4. We’ve dug deep into...
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Hot Chips 2023: Arm’s Neoverse V2
Arm has a long history in making low power CPUs, but have been trying to expand their reach into higher power and higher performance segments. At Hot Chips 2023, Arm presented the Neoverse V2, the...
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Arm at HC35 (2023): CSS-Genesis
It would be a rather large understatement to say that Arm has strong popularity in general purpose CPU cores. Arm has been going forward full speed with introducing successive generations of new...
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Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX
Bethesda has a history of making demanding AAA games set in immersive open worlds. Starfield is the latest, and can best be described as Skyrim in space. Open world games put heavy demands on...
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Hot Chips 2023: AMD’s Phoenix SoC
AMD’s mobile and small form factor journey has been arduous. In the early 2010s, the company’s Bulldozer-derived CPU cores stood no chance as Intel made massive gains in power efficiency. Zen narrowed...
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Intel’s Ponte Vecchio: Chiplets Gone Crazy
Intel is a newcomer to the world of discrete graphics cards, and the company’s Xe architecture is driving its effort to establish itself alongside AMD and Nvidia. We’ve seen Xe variants serve in...
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Arm’s Cortex A510: Two Kids in a Trench Coat
Arm’s 5-series line moves slowly. The Cortex A53 and A55 each served across multiple generations of 7-series companions, and both were 2-wide in-order cores running at low clocks. When your...
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Qualcomm’s Hexagon DSP, and now, NPU
Cell phones have to handle telecommunications and audiovisual processing while maximizing battery life. Digital Signal Processors, or DSPs, use specialized hardware to offload these tasks from the CPU...
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Zen 5’s Leaked Slides
A YouTuber called Moore’s Law is Dead recently leaked a couple AMD slides about Zen 5. I typically find leaks uninteresting as they are impossible to verify and often don’t correspond to reality. One...
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AVX10/128 is a silly idea and should be completely removed from the...
Intro and lots of context Intel recently unveiled the AVX10 specification as means for consolidating the vast majority of AVX-512 extensions into a single, easy-to-target specification. It aims to...
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Starfield on the RX 6900 XT, RX 7600, and RTX 2060 Mobile
I’ve seen quite a few comments on Discord, Reddit, Hacker News, and other places on our previous Starfield article. I wanted to address a few of these without calling anyone out, and touch on a few...
View ArticleArm Announces Total Design: Taking Neoverse CSS Forward
We recently covered the announcement of Arm’s Neoverse CSS Genesis N2 platform, a near off-the-shelf compute subsystem design created to accelerate the time to market for custom accelerators in...
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Cinebench 2024: Reviewing the Benchmark
Maxon’s Cinebench is a perennial benchmark favorite. It’s free, easy to run, and scales across as many cores as you can give it. Its $0 cost allows the internet to provide plenty of results for...
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