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Cortex X2: Arm Aims High
Arm has traditionally targeted the low end of the power and performance curve, but just as Intel has been looking to expand into the low power market, ARM is looking to expand into higher power and...
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A Brief Look at Apple’s M2 Pro iGPU
Integrated GPUs are often low-end affairs. Even when graphics performance matters, a combination of cost, die space, memory bandwidth, and power constraints prevent iGPUs’ performance from reaching...
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CPU-Z’s Inadequate Benchmark
CPU-Z is a hardware information tool from a company called CPUID, not to be confused with the CPUID instruction. Besides showing basic CPU, motherboard, and memory information, CPU-Z features a...
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Core to Core Latency Data on Large Systems
Multicore CPUs have to give user programs a way to synchronize between different cores, and ensure a coherent view of memory. A write from one core has to be made visible to others, even though each...
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ARM’s Cortex A72: aarch64 for the Masses
ARM’s Cortex A72 is a 3-wide, speculative, out of order microarchitecture launched in 2016. During its prime, it saw service in several cell phone SoCs: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 650, used in the Oppo R11...
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China’s New(ish) SW26010-Pro Supercomputer at SC23
Computing power has emerged as a crucial national resource. Ever since the first general purpose computer, ENIAC, was used to calculate artillery and bomb ballistics, compute applications have...
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Inside Kepler, Nvidia’s Strong Start on 28 nm
Nvidia’s Fermi architecture was ambitious and innovative, offering advances in GPU compute along with features like high tessellation performance. However Terascale 2’s more traditional approach...
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GCN, AMD’s GPU Architecture Modernization
AMD’s Terascale architecture became very competitive as it matured with the HD 5000 and 6000 series. But using GPUs for general purpose compute was trending around the 2010s and AMD didn’t want to...
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Cortex A57, Nintendo Switch’s CPU
In the early 2010s, Arm’s 32-bit cores had established themselves in cell phones and tablets. But rising memory capacities in those devices meant Arm would have to go 64-bit sooner or later. On top of...
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AMD’s CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
AMD has a long history of vying for GPU compute market share. Ever since Nvidia got first dibs with their Tesla architecture, AMD has been playing catch up. Terascale 3 moved from VLIW5 to VLIW4 to...
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Nintendo Switch’s iGPU: Maxwell Nerfed Edition
Graphics performance is vital for any console chip. Nintendo selected Nvidia’s Tegra X1 for their Switch handheld console. Tegra X1 is designed to maximize graphics performance in a limited power...
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A New Year and New Tests: GPU L1 Cache Bandwidth
In my past articles on GPUs, I didn’t have good measurements for L1 cache bandwidth. Microbenchmarking cache bandwidth is harder on GPUs than CPUs. That’s because programming GPUs in assembly code is...
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Maxwell: Nvidia’s Silver 28nm Hammer
Nvidia’s Kepler architecture gave the company a strong start in the 28nm era. Consumer Kepler parts provided highly competitive gaming performance and power efficiency. In the compute market, Kepler...
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Previewing Meteor Lake at CES
Intel has been using a hybrid core strategy for years in a bid to leverage their bigger engineering budget to corner AMD. Specifically, P-Cores focus on maximizing per-thread performance. E-Cores...
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Inside Qualcomm’s Adreno 530, a Small Mobile iGPU
GPU architectures vary drastically depending on their primary use cases. Mobile designs like Qualcomm’s Adreno face a daunting set of challenges, with smaller power and area budgets than even Intel’s...
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Examining AMD’s RDNA 4 Changes in LLVM
As 2024 continues on, because time never stops, AMD has been working on their upcoming RDNA 4 architecture. Part of this involves supporting open source projects like LLVM. If done right, merging...
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AMD RDNA 3.5’s LLVM Changes
Integrated graphics have been a key part of AMD’s strategy ever since they bought ATI. Bringing CPU and GPU blocks together in the same chip has given AMD substantial wins, including in Microsoft’s...
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AMD’s Mild Hybrid Strategy: Ryzen Z1 in ASUS’s ROG Ally
Editor’s Note: ASUS sent us the ROG Ally sample – our first review sample from a company – in order to test the Ryzen Z1 SOC inside the device. So a massive thank you to them! CPUs with hybrid core...
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LLVM’s Ampere1B Commit
Ampere Computing found a niche in creating ARM-based server CPUs. Ampere Altra saw service in Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For Altra, Ampere used Arm Ltd’s Neoverse N1 core design....
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Ryzen Z1’s Tiny iGPU
Editor’s Note: Just like our prior Ryzen Z1 article, the ROG Ally was kindly provided by Asus to let us test the Ryzen Z1. ASUS ROG Ally comes in two configurations: AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme and the...
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