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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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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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