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Intel’s Dunnington: Core 2 Goes Dun Dun Dun
After Conroe’s launch in 2006, Intel had an excellent core architecture (Merom). They smacked AMD around in the client space where single threaded performance was king. But in the server market,...
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AMD’s RDNA 2: Shooting For the Top
In 2019, AMD moved off their long-serving GCN architecture in favor of RDNA. We’ll cover the first generation of RDNA some other time. RDNA 2 takes that foundation and scales it up while adding...
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Loongson’s LSX and LASX Vector Extensions
Loongson used to make CPUs based off the MIPS ISA, but the company recently switched to a homegrown ISA called Loongarch. This “new” ISA retains many of MIPS’s semantics, but uses incompatible...
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Van Gogh, AMD’s Steam Deck APU
Zen 2’s launch was a defining moment for AMD. For the first time in many, many years, AMD’s single thread performance could go head to head with Intel’s best. Zen 2 also started a trend where AMD...
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Sapphire Rapids: Golden Cove Hits Servers
Last year, Intel’s Golden Cove brought the company back to competitive against AMD. Unfortunately for Intel, that only applied to the client space. AMD’s Rome and Milan CPUs have steadily eroded...
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Raytracing on AMD’s RDNA 2/3, and Nvidia’s Turing and Pascal
Note: Jake has commented that Nvidia’s tools may not show the true BVH structure. That’s a distinct possibility, as the structure implied by Nsight is indeed ridiculously wide. The rest of the article...
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AMD’s HD 6950 vs RX 6900 XT: What Does Adding 50 Do?
Note the publish day of this article. There will be a proper one on Terascale 3 later on, don’t worry. But for now, happy April Fools Day! Prestige is everything for computer hardware manufacturers. A...
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Loongson’s 3A5000: China’s Best Shot?
We at Chips and Cheese have covered two Chinese CPU architectures: Zhaoxin’s x86 compatible Lujiazui architecture found in the KX-6000 series of CPUs and Phytium’s ARM compatible FT663 architecture...
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Codecs for the 4K Era: HEVC, AV1, VVC and Beyond
This article was written in March 2023. At the time of writing, the encoders we used were still in active development. As codec standards and encoders evolve, some of the information may become...
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AMD’s 7950X3D: Zen 4 Gets VCache
Compute performance has been held back by memory performance for decades, with DRAM performance falling even further behind with every year. Caches compensate for this by trying to keep frequently...
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Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update
Hardware raytracing acceleration has come a long way since Nvidia’s Turing first introduced the technology. Even with these hardware advances, raytracing is so expensive that most games have stuck to...
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Shader Execution Reordering: Nvidia Tackles Divergence
In a previous article, we covered Cyberpunk 2077’s “Overdrive” raytracing mode. Rasterization and raytracing are both parallelizable, but raytracing tends to be less predictable. That makes it...
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ARM’s Cortex A53: Tiny But Important
Tech enthusiasts probably know ARM as a company that develops reasonably performant CPU architectures with a focus on power efficiency. Product lines like the Cortex A7xx and Cortex X series use well...
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AMD’s RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears
Editor’s Note (6/14/2023): We have a new article that reevaluates the cache latency of Navi 31, so please refer to that article for some new latency data. Late last year, AMD launched high end RDNA 3...
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Latency Testing is Hard (RDNA 3 Power Saving)
In a previous article, we compared Infinity Cache latency between the RX 7900 XTX, and the smaller RX 7600. After further testing, some correction is in order. AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture uses...
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AMD’s EPYC 7J13: Zen 3 Customized
Recently, curiosity drove me to do some microbenchmarking on Lambda Cloud’s A100 instance. That A100 instance is powered by a “AMD EPYC 7J13 64-Core Processor”. AMD’s site does not mention this SKU,...
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Nvidia’s H100: Funny L2, and Tons of Bandwidth
GPUs started out as devices meant purely for graphics rendering, but their highly parallel nature made them attractive for certain compute tasks too. As the GPU compute scene grew over the past couple...
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Kryo: Qualcomm’s Last In-House Mobile Core
CPU design is hard. You can tell because there aren’t a lot of companies doing it. AMD and Intel are your only choices in the PC scene. In the Android ecosystem, ARM Ltd’s cores dominate. Qualcomm,...
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Genoa-X: Server V-Cache Round 2
Last year we posted an article about Milan’s V-cache performance where we dived into the bandwidth and latency performance of the then-latest innovation by AMD to increase performance of its CPUs....
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AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI210: GCN Lives On
AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have all diverged their GPU architectures to separately optimize for compute and graphics. While Intel and Nvidia’s compute architectures tend to be close relatives of their...
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