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Inside Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1’s iGPU: Adreno Gets Big
Mobile SoCs have come a long way over the past eight years. I previously covered the Adreno 530 in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821, which had to do its best within a tiny power and thermal envelope using a...
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Loongson 3A6000: A Star among Chinese CPUs
Computing power has emerged as a vital resource for economies around the world. China is no exception, and the country has invested heavily into domestic CPU capabilities. Loongson is at the forefront...
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The Nerfed FPU in PS5’s Zen 2 Cores
Fritzchens Fritz’s awesome die photos revealed that the Playstation 5’s Zen 2 cores spend less die area on their FPUs than their desktop cousins. Thanks to Brutus, I got to take a closer look at just...
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Why x86 Doesn’t Need to Die
Hackaday recently published an article titled “Why x86 Needs to Die” – the latest addition in a long-running RISC vs CISC debate. Rather than x86 needing to die, I believe the RISC vs CISC debate...
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Inside Control Data Corporation’s CDC 6600
Computers fill essential roles in modern, growing economies. Banks, airlines, and other large business have used computers to efficiently handle large amounts of data. As these businesses grow and...
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Intel’s Ambitious Meteor Lake iGPU
Intel and AMD both tried to ship iGPUs fast enough to compete with low end discrete cards over the past 10 years with mixed results. Recently though, powerful iGPUs have been thrown back into the...
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Raytracing on Meteor Lake’s iGPU
Meteor Lake iGPU is a testament to Intel’s mobile graphics aspirations. It’s almost a quarter of an Arc A770. The Xe-LPG architecture used in Meteor Lake inherits Xe-HPG (A770) traits, including...
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Intel Meteor Lake’s NPU
AI is a hot topic and Intel doesn’t want to be left out, so their Meteor Lake mobile processor integrates a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Intel internally refers to the NPU as “NPU 3720”, though I...
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Sizing up Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 3 iGPU
Qualcomm has long harbored ambitions to move up into higher performance segments. Their current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 tries to make Qualcomm’s laptop dreams come true, and features in products like...
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Can China’s Loongson Catch Western Designs? Probably Not.
We previously looked at Loongson’s 3A5000 and 3A6000. The LA464 and LA664 cores in those chips are the most promising Chinese domestic designs we’ve seen so far. Both are capable of reasonable...
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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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