semiconductors/cpus
It is often said that companies – particularly large companies with enormous IT budgets – do not buy products, they buy roadmaps. No one wants to go to
After persistent rumors refused to recede, AMD steps in with a clear explanation why dual-CCD V-Cache doesn't exist.
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
The CCD stack with 3D V-Cache on the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is only 40-45µm in total, but the rest of the layers add up to a whopping 750µm.
A loop buffer sits at a CPU's frontend, where it holds a small number of previously fetched instructions.
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silico...
Intel was a dominant leader in the CPU market for the better part of a decade, but AMD has seen massive success in recent years thanks to its Ryzen chips.
Nitro, Graviton, EFA, Inferentia, Trainium, Nvidia Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Handicapping Infrastructure, AI As A Service, Enterprise Automation, Meta, Coreweave, TCO
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 same Zen 5 architecture event, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said, “Zen 5 is a ground-up redesign of the Zen architecture,” which has brought numerous and impactful changes to the design of the core.
A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip,
Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: About half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. This has prompted Baikal Electronics, a Russian processor developer, to expand the number of packaging partners in the country, according to a report in Vedomosti, a Russian-language business dai...
Researchers also disclosed a separate bug called “Inception” for newer AMD CPUs.
Downfall attacks targets a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers.
Micron $MU looks very weak in AI
The company’s PowerVia interconnect tech demonstrated a 6 percent performance gain
GPUs may dominate, but CPUs could be perfect for smaller AI models
Tech enthusiasts probably know ARM as a company that develops reasonably performant CPU architectures with a focus on power efficiency.
Over the past 10-15 years, per-core throughput increases have slowed, and in response CPU designers have scaled up core counts and socket counts to continue increasing performance across generations of new CPU models.
While microprocessors are used in various applications, they are precluded from the use in high-energy physics applications due to the harsh radiation present. To overcome this limitation a...
In the march to more capable, faster, smaller, and lower…
It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but the skyrocketing costs of designing chips is colliding with the ever-increasing need for performance,
Chinese chip designer Loongson, which has tried to reduce the country’s reliance on Intel and AMD, is developing its own general-purpose GPU despite being added to a US trade blacklist.
Just one instruction at a time!
If a few cores are good, then a lot of cores ought to be better. But when it comes to HPC this isn’t always the case, despite what the Top500 ranking –
Both companies are rolling out mitigations, but they add overhead of 12 to 28 percent.
Hertzbleed attack targets power-conservation feature found on virtually all modern CPUs.
In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and su…
A detailed, critical, technical essay on upcoming CPU architectures.
Software optimization manuals for C++ and assembly code. Intel and AMD x86 microprocessors. Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X. 16, 32 and 64 bit systems. Detailed descriptions of microarchitectures.
There are some features in any architecture that are essential, foundational, and non-negotiable. Right up to the moment that some clever architect shows
AMD recently unveiled 3D V-Cache, their first 3D-stacked technology-based product. Leapfrogging contemporary 3D bonding technologies, AMD jumped directly into advanced packaging with direct bonding and an order of magnitude higher wire density.
Although competition from Arm is increasing, AMD remains Intel’s biggest competitor, as concerns of losing market share weigh on Intel’s valuation.
A new CPU design has won accolades for defeating the hacking efforts of nearly 600 experts during a DARPA challenge. Its approach could help us close side-channel vulnerabilities in the future.
Apple is positioning its M1 quite differently from any CPU Intel or AMD has released. The long-term impact on the PC market could be significant.
Sapphire Rapids, Intel's next server architecture, looks like a large leap over the just-launched Ice Lake SP.
Technically legal, but strange.
The “Milan” Epyc 7003 processors, the third generation of AMD’s revitalized server CPUs, is now in the field, and we await the entry of the “Ice Lake”
AMD is one of the oldest designers of large scale microprocessors and has been the subject of polarizing debate among technology enthusiasts for nearly 50 years. Its...
With every passing year, as AMD first talked about its plans to re-enter the server processor arena and give Intel some real, much needed, and very direct
Understanding Intel® processor names and numbers helps identify the best laptop, desktop, or mobile device CPU for your computing needs.
In this article, I would like to shortly describe the methods used to dump and restore the different kinds of registers on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 CPUs. The first part will focus on General Purpose Registers, Debug Registers and Floating-Point Registers up to the XMM registers provided by the SSE extension. I will explain how their values can be obtained via the ptrace(2) interface.
They say "performance is king'... It was true a decade ago and it certainly is now. With more and mor...
When it comes to hashing, sometimes 64 bit is not enough, for example, because of birthday paradox — the hacker can iterate through random $latex 2^{32}$ entities and it can be proven that wi…
The x86 instruction set refers to the set of instructions that x86-compatible microprocessors support. The instructions are usually part of an executable program, often stored as a computer file and executed on the processor.
Fujitsu Limited today announced that it began shipping the supercomputer Fugaku, which is jointly developed with RIKEN and promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology with the aim of starting general operation between 2021 and 2022. The first machine to be shipped this time is one of the computer units of Fugaku, a supercomputer system comprised of over 150,000 high-performance CPUs connected together. Fujitsu will continue to deliver the units to RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, for installation and tuning.
Recent leaks may shed some light on Intel's upcoming mainstream desktop Comet Lake-S CPUs.
Intel's Tremont CPU microarchitecture will be the foundation of a next-generation, low-power processors that target a wide variety of products across
A post describing how C programs get to the main function. Devicetree layouts, linker scripts, minimal C runtimes, GDB and QEMU, basic RISC-V assembly, and other topics are reviewed along the way.
Excessive instruction cache misses are the kind of a performance problem that's going to appear only in larger codebases. In this article, I'm describing some ideas on how to deal with this issue.
Repository for the tools and non-commercial data used for the "Accelerator wall" paper. - PrincetonUniversity/accelerator-wall
Monday night Amazon announced the new 'A1' instance type for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that is powered by their own 'Graviton' ARMv8 processors.
It might have been difficult to see this happening a mere few years ago, but the National Nuclear Security Administration and one of its key
Intel's Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake" Desktop CPU specifications have now been finalized and we are just a month away from the official launch.