Raytracing on AMD’s RDNA 2/3, and Nvidia’s Turing and Pascal

Raytracing aims to accurately model light by following the paths of light rays and seeing what they hit. However, raytracing is quite expensive compared to say, calculating light values by taking a pixel’s distance to light sources and doing an inverse square root. You…

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 Intel’s server dominance. With the bulk of recently added systems on TOP500 using…

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 brought up to 16 cores to desktop…

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 encodings. Loongarch also gets extended to better support Loongson’s goals of making…

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 raytracing support and a few other enhancements. We already covered…

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, multithreaded performance is extremely important. There, AMD still held the advantage because their…

Previewing China’s Loongson 3A5000 with Performance Counters

Loongson’s 3A5000 represents another domestic CPU effort from China. It implements four LA464 cores, and targets everything from desktops to servers to embedded applications. Like the Zhaoxin KX-6640MA and Phytium D2000 that we covered previously, Loongson’s chip runs at low clock speeds. But unlike…

Bulldozer, AMD’s Crash Modernization: Caching and Conclusion

In Part 1, we looked at Bulldozer’s core architecture. But the architecture itself isn’t the full story. Memory advances have not kept up with CPU speed, so modern CPUs cope with increasingly sophisticated caching setups. They have to cope with cache latency as well,…

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