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, MediaTek, Samsung and other SoC makers put chips together with varying core counts, GPUs, and other IP blocks. The…
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 balanced, moderately sized out-of-order execution engines to achieve those goals. But ARM covers lower power and performance tiers too. Such cores are arguably…
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
By now it is pretty clear that Apple’s M1 chip is a big deal. And the implications for the rest of the industry is gradually becoming clearer. In this story I want to talk about a connection to RISC-V microprocessors which may not be obvious to most readers.
In that story I talked about two factors driving M1 performance. One was the use of massive number of decoders and Out-of-Order Execution (OoOE). Don’t worry it that sounds like technological gobbledegook to you.
This story will be all about the other part:
Heterogenous computing. Apple is aggressively pursued a strategy of adding specialized hardware units, I will refer to as