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Chips and Cheese
The Devil is in the Details! Deep dives into computer hardware and software and the wider industry... Click to read Chips and Cheese, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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- 314 from 13 Dec 2020 to 24 Oct 2026
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2026 39
- “Performance” Oryon: Qualcomm’s Little Core
- Nvidia Vera’s System Architecture: Pushing Bandwidth
- NVIDIA’s Olympus Core: Pushing Server Single Threaded Performance Boundaries
- Qualcomm’s System Level Architecture in the Snapdragon X2 Elite
- Qualcomm’s Adreno X2 GPU
- On Binary Translation and its Consequences
- Arm’s C2-Ultra, G2-Ultra NX, and CSS N4 IP
- Hot Chips 2026: Interviewing IBM's Christian Zoellin & Christian Jacobi
- Hot Chips 2026: XCENA and Samsung’s Near-Memory Compute CXL Device
- Hot Chips 2026: Samsung’s Processing-in-Memory (PIM)
- Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Crescent Island
- Hot Chips 2026: Fujitsu’s Monaka CPU
- Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Diamond Rapids
- SiFive’s First Server Platform
- Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Wildcat Lake
- Hot Chips 2026: CUDA Targets RISC-V
- Hot Chips 2026: Applying High Bandwidth Flash (HBF)
- Hot Chips 2026: Samsung and HBM Base Die Opportunities
- Talking with Synopsys about the Physics of Chip Design at DAC 2026
- NVIDIA’s Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose
- Arm’s Cortex A55
- RosaicLabs, Atom RTL, and 32-Tile AMX: Trying to Piece Together a x86 Puzzle
- AMD Advancing AI 2026: Talking CDNA5 with AMD’s Alan Smith
- AMD’s Instinct MI455X: Aiming for the Sun
- LLVM Divination of GFX1251’s Differences
- Scrying the AMD GFX1250 LLVM Tea Leaves
- Is x86 ready to ACE it?
- TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1
- An Interview with Intel's Kira Boyko: Xeon 6+'s Product Director
- Evaluating SPEC CPU2026
- Evaluating Geekbench 6
- Investigating Split Locks on x86-64
- Embracing AI with Claude's C Compiler
- Microbenchmarking Chipsets for Giggles
- Analyzing Nvidia GB10's GPU
- Arm's Cortex X925: Reaching Desktop Performance
- Arm’s Cortex A725 ft. Dell’s Pro Max with GB10
- CES 2026: Taking the Lids off AMD's Venice and MI400 SoCs
- Diving into Qualcomm's Upcoming Adreno X2 GPU with Eric Demers
2025 63
- Inside Nvidia GB10’s Memory Subsystem, from the CPU Side
- SC25: The Present and Future of HPC Networking with Cornelis Networks CEO Lisa Spelman
- Nvidia’s B200: Keeping the CUDA Juggernaut Rolling ft. Verda (formerly DataCrunch)
- SC25: Estimating AMD’s Upcoming MI430X’s FP64 and the Discovery Supercomputer
- Evaluating Uniform Memory Access Mode on AMD's Turin ft. Verda (formerly DataCrunch.io)
- SC25: HACCing over 500 Petaflops on Frontier
- Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite
- Strix Halo’s Memory Subsystem: Tackling iGPU Challenges
- Evaluating the Infinity Cache in AMD Strix Halo
- AMD’s Chiplet APU: An Overview of Strix Halo
- Panther Lake’s Reveal at ITT 2025
- Interviewing Intel's Chief Architect of x86 Cores at Intel Tech Tour 2025
- AMD’s EPYC 9355P: Inside a 32 Core Zen 5 Server Chip
- A Look into Intel Xeon 6’s Memory Subsystem
- AMD's Inaugural Tech Day ft. ROCm 7, Modular, and AMD Lab Tour
- Everactive’s Self-Powered SoC at Hot Chips 2025
- AMD’s RDNA4 GPU Architecture at Hot Chips 2025
- Intel’s E2200 “Mount Morgan” IPU at Hot Chips 2025
- Hot Chips 2025: Session 1 - CPUs
- PEZY-SC4s at Hot Chips 2025
- Liquid Cooling Exhibits at Hot Chips 2025
- Condor’s Cuzco RISC-V Core at Hot Chips 2025
- Intel's Clearwater Forest E-Core Server Chip at Hot Chips 2025
- Google's Liquid Cooling at Hot Chips 2025
- Skymont in Gaming Workloads
- Running Gaming Workloads through AMD’s Zen 5
- Huawei's Kunpeng 920 and TaiShan v110 CPU Architecture
- AMD’s Magny Cours and HyperTransport Interconnect: A High Core Count Blast from the Past
- Intel’s Lion Cove P-Core and Gaming Workloads
- Blackwell: Nvidia’s Massive GPU
- AMD's Freshly-baked MI350: An Interview with the Chief Architect
- AMD’s CDNA 4 Architecture Announcement
- AMD’s Pre-Zen Interconnect: Testing Trinity’s Northbridge
- Qualcomm's Centriq 2400 and the Falkor Architecture
- Computex 2025: RX 9060 XT, Threadripper 9000, ROCm, and more
- Computex 2025: Nvidia's Keynote
- Computex 2025: Intel ARC Pro B-Series
- Arm’s Bifrost Architecture and the Mali-G52
- Zhaoxin’s KX-7000
- RDNA 4’s Raytracing Improvements
- Dynamic Register Allocation on AMD's RDNA 4 GPU Architecture
- Inside Nvidia's GeForce 6000 Series
- An Interview with Oxide's Bryan Cantrill
- RDNA 4's "Out-of-Order" Memory Accesses
- Looking Ahead at Intel’s Xe3 GPU Architecture
- Raytracing on Intel’s Arc B580
- AMD's RDNA4 Architecture (Video)
- Zen 5's AVX-512 Frequency Behavior
- Intel’s Battlemage Architecture
- Alibaba/T-HEAD's Xuantie C910
- A RISC-V Progress Check: Benchmarking P550 and C910
- Inside SiFive’s P550 Microarchitecture
- Disabling Zen 5’s Op Cache and Exploring its Clustered Decoder
- Sizing up MI300A’s GPU
- Inside the AMD Instinct MI300A's Giant Memory Subsystem
- Nvidia's Announcements at CES 2025
- AMD's Strix Halo - Under the Hood
- AMD's CES 2025 Keynote
- Intel's CES 2025 Keynote
- Digging into Driver Overhead on Intel's B580
- Analyzing Lion Cove's Memory Subsystem in Arrow Lake
- NeuReality: A Server on a PCIe Card
- d-Matrix Corsair: 256GB of LPDDR for AI Models
2024 80
- IBM Power - What's Next?
- Skymont in Desktop Form: Atom Unleashed
- Rebellions: From High Frequency Trading to AI Acceleration
- Fujitsu's Monaka CPU: ARMv9, SVE2, and 3D Stacking
- Turning off Zen 4's Op Cache for Curiosity and Giggles
- 400G Omnipath is Coming: Cornelis Networks at SC24
- Examining Intel's Arrow Lake, at the System Level
- An EPYC Exclusive for Azure: AMD's MI300C
- AMD Disables Zen 4's Loop Buffer
- NextSilicon: Putting HPC First
- Ayar Labs at Supercomputing 2024: Making Light Move Bits (YouTube Short)
- Pushing AMD’s Infinity Fabric to its Limits
- Supercomputing 2024: El Capitan, MI300A, and More on the Fastest Supercomputers!
- Chips and Cheese's Microbenchmark Framework
- AMD's 9800X3D: 2nd Generation V-Cache
- Broadwell’s eDRAM: VCache before VCache was Cool
- Stability, The Cost Of Intel's Time To Market Approach (Video)
- Running SPEC CPU2017 on Chinese CPUs, and More
- AMD's Turin: 5th Gen EPYC Launched
- Lunar Lake’s iGPU: Debut of Intel’s Xe2 Architecture
- The Next Stage for Chips and Cheese
- Skymont: Intel’s E-Cores reach for the Sky
- Chips and Cheese Interviews Ronak Singhal
- Lion Cove: Intel’s P-Core Roars
- Intel Granite Rapids: A Step in the Right Direction (Video)
- Intel’s Redwood Cove: Baby Steps are Still Steps
- Running SPEC CPU2017 at Chips and Cheese?
- Discussing AMD’s Zen 5 at Hot Chips 2024
- FuriosaAI’s RNGD at Hot Chips 2024: Accelerating AI with a More Flexible Primitive
- Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy
- An Interview with Susan Eickhoff and Christian Jacobi from IBM at Hot Chips 2024
- An Interview with Intel’s Arik Gihon about Lunar Lake at Hot Chips 2024
- AmpereOne at Hot Chips 2024: Maximizing Density
- Tesla’s TTPoE at Hot Chips 2024: Replacing TCP for Low Latency Applications
- Hot Chips 2024: Qualcomm’s Oryon Core
- AMD’s Radeon 890M: Strix Point’s Bigger iGPU
- Zen 5 Variants and More, Clock for Clock
- AMD’s Ryzen 9950X: Zen 5 on Desktop
- AMD’s Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile
- Cortex A73’s Not-So-Infinite Reordering Capacity
- Grace Hopper, Nvidia’s Halfway APU
- Zen 5’s 2-Ahead Branch Predictor Unit: How a 30 Year Old Idea Allows for New Tricks
- Arm’s Neoverse V2, in AWS’s Graviton 4
- Arm’s Cortex A73: Resource Limits, What are Those?
- A Video Interview with Mike Clark, Chief Architect of Zen at AMD
- Qualcomm’s Oryon Core: A Long Time in the Making
- The Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno iGPU
- Examining the Nintendo Switch (Tegra X1) Video Engine
- Testing AMD’s Giant MI300X
- Testing AMD’s Bergamo: Zen 4c Spam
- Intel Details Skymont
- Tracing Intel’s Atom Journey: Goldmont Plus
- Intel’s Lion Cove Architecture Preview
- Thoughts on Skymont Slides
- Update on Meteor Lake DRAM Latency Measurements
- Comparing Crestmonts: No L3 Hurts
- Qualcomm’s Oryon LLVM Patches
- Meteor Lake’s E-Cores: Crestmont Makes Incremental Progress
- Chips and Cheese State of the Union
- Correction on Qualcomm iGPUs
- Inside the Snapdragon 855’s iGPU
- Can China’s Loongson Catch Western Designs? Probably Not.
- Sizing up Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 3 iGPU
- Intel Meteor Lake’s NPU
- Raytracing on Meteor Lake’s iGPU
- Intel’s Ambitious Meteor Lake iGPU
- Inside Control Data Corporation’s CDC 6600
- Why x86 Doesn’t Need to Die
- The Nerfed FPU in PS5’s Zen 2 Cores
- Loongson 3A6000: A Star among Chinese CPUs
- Inside Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1’s iGPU: Adreno Gets Big
- Ryzen Z1’s Tiny iGPU
- LLVM’s Ampere1B Commit
- AMD’s Mild Hybrid Strategy: Ryzen Z1 in ASUS’s ROG Ally
- AMD RDNA 3.5’s LLVM Changes
- Examining AMD’s RDNA 4 Changes in LLVM
- Inside Qualcomm’s Adreno 530, a Small Mobile iGPU
- Previewing Meteor Lake at CES
- Maxwell: Nvidia’s Silver 28nm Hammer
- A New Year and New Tests: GPU L1 Cache Bandwidth
2023 58
- Nintendo Switch’s iGPU: Maxwell Nerfed Edition
- AMD’s CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
- Cortex A57, Nintendo Switch’s CPU
- GCN, AMD’s GPU Architecture Modernization
- Inside Kepler, Nvidia’s Strong Start on 28 nm
- China’s New(ish) SW26010-Pro Supercomputer at SC23
- Coming soon
- ARM’s Cortex A72: aarch64 for the Masses
- Core to Core Latency Data on Large Systems
- CPU-Z’s Inadequate Benchmark
- A Brief Look at Apple’s M2 Pro iGPU
- Cortex X2: Arm Aims High
- Cinebench 2024: Reviewing the Benchmark
- Arm Announces Total Design: Taking Neoverse CSS Forward
- Starfield on the RX 6900 XT, RX 7600, and RTX 2060 Mobile
- AVX10/128 is a silly idea and should be completely removed from the specification
- Zen 5’s Leaked Slides
- Qualcomm’s Hexagon DSP, and now, NPU
- Arm’s Cortex A510: Two Kids in a Trench Coat
- Intel’s Ponte Vecchio: Chiplets Gone Crazy
- Hot Chips 2023: AMD’s Phoenix SoC
- Analyzing Starfield’s Performance on Nvidia’s 4090 and AMD’s 7900 XTX
- Arm at HC35 (2023): CSS-Genesis
- Hot Chips 2023: Arm’s Neoverse V2
- Hot Chips 2023: Characterizing Gaming Workloads on Zen 4
- Hot Chips 2023: SiFive’s P870 Takes RISC-V Further
- Hot Chips 2023: Ventana’s Unconventional Veyron V1
- Ivy Bridge’s Gen7 Graphics: Intel’s Modern iGPU Push
- Correction for A710/Neoverse N2’s FP Scheduler Layout
- ARM’s Neoverse N2: Cortex A710 for Servers
- ARM’s Cortex A710: Winning by Default
- Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation
- AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI210: GCN Lives On
- Genoa-X: Server V-Cache Round 2
- Kryo: Qualcomm’s Last In-House Mobile Core
- Nvidia’s H100: Funny L2, and Tons of Bandwidth
- AMD’s EPYC 7J13: Zen 3 Customized
- Latency Testing is Hard (RDNA 3 Power Saving)
- AMD’s RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears
- ARM’s Cortex A53: Tiny But Important
- Shader Execution Reordering: Nvidia Tackles Divergence
- Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update
- AMD’s 7950X3D: Zen 4 Gets VCache
- Codecs for the 4K Era: HEVC, AV1, VVC and Beyond
- Loongson’s 3A5000: China’s Best Shot?
- AMD’s HD 6950 vs RX 6900 XT: What Does Adding 50 Do?
- Raytracing on AMD’s RDNA 2/3, and Nvidia’s Turing and Pascal
- Sapphire Rapids: Golden Cove Hits Servers
- Van Gogh, AMD’s Steam Deck APU
- Loongson’s LSX and LASX Vector Extensions
- AMD’s RDNA 2: Shooting For the Top
- Intel’s Dunnington: Core 2 Goes Dun Dun Dun
- Previewing China’s Loongson 3A5000 with Performance Counters
- Bulldozer, AMD’s Crash Modernization: Caching and Conclusion
- Bulldozer, AMD’s Crash Modernization: Frontend and Execution Engine
- Golden Cove’s Vector Register File: Checking with Official (SPR) Data
- Microbenchmarking AMD’s RDNA 3 Graphics Architecture
- AMD’s Zen 4, Part 3: System Level Stuff, and iGPU
2022 40
- Golden Cove’s Lopsided Vector Register File
- Was Rocket Lake Power Efficient?
- Knight’s Landing: Atom with AVX-512
- Cannon Lake: Intel’s Forgotten Generation
- AMD’s Zen 4, Part 2: Memory Subsystem and Conclusion
- AMD’s Zen 4 Part 1: Frontend and Execution Engine
- Microbenchmarking Nvidia’s RTX 4090
- Why you can’t trust CPUID
- Addendum: Clock Ramp on ADL, Zen 4, M1, and More
- Microbenchmarking Intel’s Arc A770
- Skylake: Intel’s Longest Serving Architecture
- Hot Chips 34 – Biren’s BR100: A Machine Learning GPU from China
- China’s Phytium D2000: Building on A72?
- Nvidia’s RTX 4090 Launch: A Strong Ray-Tracing Focus
- Hot Chips 34 – AMD’s Instinct MI200 Architecture
- How Quickly do CPUs Change Clock Speeds?
- Hot Chips 34 – Intel’s Meteor Lake Chiplets, Compared to AMD’s
- Hot Chips 34 – Tesla’s Dojo Microarchitecture
- Tachyum’s Revised Prodigy Architecture
- A Preview of Raptor Lake’s Improved L2 Caches
- AMD’s Athlon 64: Getting the Basics Right
- Caching Energy Efficiency Data – Mobile and AVX-512
- Alder Lake’s Caching and Power Efficiency
- Tachyum: Too Good to be True?
- Intel’s Netburst: Failure is a Foundation for Success
- Sunny Cove: Intel’s Lost Generation
- Graviton 3: First Impressions
- iGPU Cache Setups Compared, Including M1
- Examining Centaur CHA’s Die and Implementation Goals
- Centaur CHA’s Probably Unfinished Dual Socket Implementation
- Intel Renames Oregon Fab: Gordon Moore Park. Adds +270k sq ft, 18A Node now 2024
- GPU Hardware Video Encoders – How Good Are They?
- VIA Part 4 – A Deep Dive into Centaur’s Last CPU Core: CNS
- SiFive Completes Series F Funding Round: +$175m, $2.5b Evaluation
- State of Windows on Arm64: a high-level perspective
- Going Armchair Quarterback on Golden Cove’s Caches
- Alder Lake’s Power Efficiency – A Complicated Picture
- Deep Diving Zen 3 V-Cache
- AMD’s V-Cache Tested: The Latency Teaser
- Intel’s Tremont: Atom Changes Course
2021 31
- Gracemont: Revenge of the Atom Cores
- Alder Lake – E-Cores, Ring Clock, and Hybrid Teething Troubles
- Popping the Hood on Golden Cove
- Zhaoxin Part 3: A Sort of Anti-Climax
- Deep Diving Neoverse N1
- Do IBM’s Giant L3 and V-Cache Represent the Future?
- The Weird and Wacky World of VIA Part 2: Zhaoxin’s not quite Electric Boogaloo
- Analyzing Video Card Efficiency, Part I – Power
- The Weird and Wacky World of VIA, the 3rd player in the “Modern” x86 market
- Details on the Gigabyte Leak
- Neoverse N1 vs Zen 2: ARM in Practice
- Measuring Zen 3’s Bottlenecks
- ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter
- How Zen 2’s Op Cache Affects Performance
- The End of an Era: AMD Discontinues Pre-2016 GCN GPU Support
- Nvidia’s Ampere & Process Technology: Sunk by Samsung?
- Exploring CPU Core to Core Latency and the Role that Locks Play
- GPU Memory Latency’s Impact, and Updated Test
- RDNA 1 Redux: Maximizing Performance With RX 5000 Series GPUs
- Measuring GPU Memory Latency
- Rocket Lake: When ‘Reviews’ are Really Previews
- Lowering the BAR: AMD’s 6700 XT launch and the Importance of Disclosure
- Modern Data Compression in 2021 Part 2 : The Battle to Dethrone JPEG with JPEG-XL, AVIF, and WEBP
- Analyzing Zen 2’s Cinebench R15 Lead
- CTR Safety, Revisited
- Security and You, an Overview
- AMD’s Past and Future CPUs (Formal Retraction)
- CTR: A Review and a Warning (updated)
- Modern Data Compression in 2021 Part 1: A Simple Overview on the Art of Image Encoding
- Intel Finally Solving the Right Problem
- Intel’s HEDT Roadmap