cpu.md

CPU

Curious how TSMC manages to squeeze so much performance out of their CPUs.

Notes

• Math is often significantly faster than L1 cache hits, so memoization in many cases is actually a performance loss. Need to benchmark it though.

Links

• RISC-V - Free and Open RISC Instruction Set Architecture.
• Digging into RISC-V and how I learn new things (2019)
• SHAKTI - Open-source Processor Development Ecosystem.
• I don't know how CPUs work so I simulated one in code (2019)
• Simple Computer - Whilst reading But How Do It Know? by J. Clark Scott I felt compelled to write something to simulate the computer the book describes.
• Awesome CPU and MCU documentation
• How do CPUs read machine code? (2019) (Reddit)
• CPU Microcodes - Intel, AMD, VIA & Freescale CPU Microcode Repositories.
• CPU Scheduling
• uarch-bench - Benchmark for low-level CPU micro-architectural features.
• Performance Analysis & Tuning on Modern CPU - Denis Bakhvalov (2020)
• x86 and amd64 instruction reference
• IA32-doc - Project which aims to put as many definitions from the Intel Manual into machine-processable format as possible.
• CPU caches and data locality: a small demonstration (2020) (Lobsters)
• What is a stack and how does it work? (2020)
• Branch prediction explained
• x86-info-term - Terminal viewer for x86 instruction/intrinsic information using Python 3 + curses.
• Cosmic - Stellar simulated 8-bit computer architecture.
• Optimized implementations of various library functions for ARM architecture processors
• Chipping away at Moore's law. Modern CPUs are just chiplets connected together (2020)
• SIMD instructions (HN)
• Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you've never heard of (2014) (HN)
• X86-64 Semantics - Complete and thoroughly tested formal semantics of x86-64 to date.
• Efficient and performance-portable SIMD wrapper
• The DooM-chip: no CPU, no opcodes, no instruction counter (2020) (HN)
• Unicorn Engine - Lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture CPU emulator framework. (Code)
• afl-unicorn - Lets you fuzz any piece of binary that can be emulated by Unicorn Engine.
• Archspec - Library for detecting, labeling, and reasoning about microarchitectures.
• Branch prediction in CPUs
• Examining ARM vs X86 Memory Models with Rust (2020) (HN)
• Single-use JIT Performance on x86 Processors (HN)
• ARMRef - iOS, iPadOS, and macOS application reference manual for ARM assembly instructions.
• Produce your own physical chips. For free. In the Open. (2020) (HN)
• Improving performance with SIMD intrinsics in three use cases (2020) (HN)
• Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage (2020)
• An Intel 8080 assembler and online simulator (2020)
• CoreMark - Industry-standard benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) and embedded microcrontrollers (MCU).
• How Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography works (2020)
• SIMDe - Implementations of SIMD instruction sets for systems which don't natively support them. (HN)
• Itanium Processor Microarchitecture (2000)
• Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM)
• sse2neon - C/C++ header file that converts Intel SSE intrinsics to Arm/Aarch64 NEON intrinsics.
• Toward the 1nm Technology Generation: Imec Roadmap for Logic Technology (2020)
• Gperftools CPU Profiler
• VSCode JS Profile Visualizer - Custom editor for viewing .cpuprofile files in VS Code. Pairs well with new JavaScript debugger.
• LDM: My Favorite ARM Instruction (2020) (HN)
• How Debuggers Work: Getting and Setting x86 Registers (2020)
• Taiwan Semiconductor - Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company.
• AMD Research Instruction Based Sampling Toolkit
• Dynarmic - Dynamic recompiler for ARM.
• Reverse-engineering the carry-lookahead circuit in the Intel 8008 processor (2020) (HN)
• ARM Memory Model Tool: Morello (and Some Memory Tagging) (2020)
• Graphs, Metagraphs, RAM, CPU: HyperGraphs are more memory efficient than graphs (2020)
• Intel's disruption is now complete (2020) (HN)
• ARM processor history (2020)
• Bitdefender disassembler - Lightweight, x86/x64 only instruction decoder.
• Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPUs book (Code)
• Under the hood of a CPU: Reverse Engineering the P6 microcode | Peter Bosch (2020)
• 2020 Wheeler Lecture: The Future of Microprocessors
• c8c - Aims to be a small typeless programming language for the CHIP-8 virtual machine.
• vrCPU - Code, documentation, schematics, notes for my Ben Eater inspired breadboard computer and emulator.
• ARM and Lock-Free Programming (2020)
• Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? (2020) (HN)
• Collection of information about ARM cortex-M
• Ask HN: How did Apple manage to create such a better chip than Intel? (2020)
• ARM Cortex-A72 fetch and branch processing (2020)
• The Secret History of the First Microprocessor, the F-14, and Me (2020)
• sandsifter - x86 processor fuzzer.
• Undocumented arm64 ISA extension present on the Apple M1 (Reddit)
• MIPS-Simulator - Functional MIPS CPU simulator implemented in Haskell.
• From microops to abstract resources: constructing simpler CPU performance models (2020)
• Let's Build a Microprocessor! - From NAND to RISC, using JavaScript as a HDL.
• ARM NEON intrinsics guide
• ASL Interpreter - Example implementation of Arm's Architecture Specification Language (ASL). (Fork)
• Corellium - ARM Device Virtualization. (GitHub)
• Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps (HN)
• Fritzchens Fritz's Albums - Gorgeous high resolution die shots of (mostly) modern chips.
• Lobsters: How much are non x86/arm platforms used? (2021)
• MIPS Emulator written in Go
• The CPU Shack - History of Microprocessors & CPU Techo.
• The 486 CPU Era – The Birth of Overclocking (2021)
• How CPUs are Designed and Built (2020)
• Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade (2021) (HN)
• Our Journey to ARM | PSPDFKit (2021)
• Understanding modern state-of-the-art branch predictor (2021)
• Application Binary Interface for the Arm Architecture
• A CPU With Just One Instruction (2019)
• v86 - Emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware.
• RISC vs. CISC
• Where the top of the stack is on x86 (2011) (HN)
• Architecture All Access: Modern CPU Architecture (2021)
• How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS (2021) (HN)
• UCodeDisasm: Intel Atom Disassembler
• Atomics in AArch64 (2021)
• CPU Fun Blog - Intended to cover various subjects related to the low-level interactions of software and hardware.
• Building an Always-On CPU Profiler (2021)
• Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU (2021) (HN)
• What should the CPU usage be of a fully-loaded CPU that has been throttled? (2021) (HN)
• Your CPU May Have Slowed Down on Wednesday (2021) (HN)
• CPU Pinning and CPU Sets (2020)
• A natively flexible 32-bit Arm microprocessor (2021) (HN)
• PlasticArm: Get Your Next CPU, Made Without Silicon (2021) (Lobsters)
• Beating the L1 cache with value speculation (2021) (HN) (Tweet)
• Hunting a bug in the i40e Intel driver (2021)
• An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer (2021) (HN)
• ASML business breakdown (2021)
• Next-gen chips will be powered from below (2021) (HN)
• Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips (2021)
• Turing Complete Game - Game where you build a CPU and assembly language from circuits.
• A bug that doesn’t exist on x86: Exploiting an ARM-only race condition (HN)
• The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor (2021) (HN)
• Designing a MIPS CPU in Hardcaml (HN)
• A Close Look at a Spinlock (2021)
• How to Make a CPU – A Simple Picture Based Explanation (2021) (HN)
• Implementing CHIP-8 in Jack (2021)
• n2t-wasm - Emulator for the nand2tetris computer (Hack CPU).
• memu - ARMv8-M/Cortex-M emulator/simulator.
• SCAMP CPU - Homebrew 16-bit CPU with a homebrew Unix-like-ish operating system. (Web)
• mainspring - CPU and device simulation framework focused on extensibility and flexibility of hardware layouts.
• Why It’s So Difficult – and Costly – To Secure Chips (2021) (HN)
• Graviton2 and Graviton3 (2021) (HN)
• Reverse Engineering the M1 (2021)
• What can you do with an ISA specification? (2021)
• JDH-8 - Fully custom 8-bit minicomputer with a unique architecture.
• Performance Ninja Class - Online course where you can learn to find and fix low-level performance issues, for example CPU cache misses and branch mispredictions.
• Ask HN: Are we entering an ARM era? (2021)
• Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix (2019)
• CPU implemented in an analog modular synthesizer (Tweet) (HN)
• A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop (2021) (HN) (Reddit)
• Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win (2022) (HN)
• CPU-X - Free software that gathers information on CPU, motherboard and more.
• Alex Blewitt - Understanding CPU microarchitecture (2022)
• System V Application Binary Interface (2020 (HN)
• Thoughts on Intel software-defined silicon (2022) (HN)
• The AMD Branch (Mis)predictor: Just Set it and Forget it (2022)
• BLAS-level CPU Performance in 100 Lines of C (HN)
• Simple three-stage pipeline RISC-V implementation written in Chisel 3 HDL with support for AXI4-Lite
• Pico-8: CPU
• Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max (2021)
• Apple M1 Ultra (2022) (HN)
• Introduction to Apple Silicon (Lobsters)
• pycachesim - Python Cache Hierarchy Simulator. Accurately simulate the caching (allocation/hit/miss/replace/evict) behavior of all cache levels found in modern processors.
• Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon (2022) (HN)
• Single-Chip Processors Have Reached Their Limits (2022) (HN)
• gProfiler - System-wide profiler, combining multiple sampling profilers to produce unified visualization of what your CPU is spending time on.
• Apple Silicon Guide
• Evaluating Graviton 2 for data-intensive applications: Arm vs. Intel comparison (2022) (HN)
• Crash course introduction to parallelism: Multithreading (2022) (Reddit)
• cpu - CPU command in Go, inspired by the Plan 9 CPU command.
• Inside the Apple-1's shift-register memory (2022)
• The AMD Branch (Mis)predictor: New Types and Methods of Straight-Line Speculation (SLS) Vulnerabilities (2022)
• Assembler Simulator - Simulator of 8-bit CPU using the "Samphire" Microprocessor Simulator instruction set.
• Y86 Emulator - Y86 pipeline CPU simulator in JavaScript. (Code)
• CPUs, cloud VMs, and noisy neighbors: the limits of parallelism (2022)
• The TRUTH of TSMC 5nm: Claimed Density vs Reality (2022) (Reddit)
• AMD’s Athlon 64: Getting the Basics Right (2022) (HN)
• Code Density Compared Between Way Too Many Instruction Sets (Lobsters)
• Binary Translators for Weak Memory Model Architectures (HN)
• Astro-8 Computer - 16-bit homebrew CPU.
• Introduction to Apple Silicon (HN)
• Custom Processing Unit - Dynamic analysis framework able to hook, patch and trace CPU microcode at the software level.
• SiliFuzz - System that finds CPU defects by fuzzing software proxies.
• CPU Benchmarks Set
• Intel’s Meteor Lake Chiplets, Compared to AMD’s (2022) (HN)
• Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs? (2022)
• A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip (2022) (HN) (Part 2)
• High-NA may be the end of the line for lithography (2022)
• Zen4's AVX512 Teardown (2022) (HN)
• ASML's Secret: A view from inside the global semiconductor giant (2022) (HN)
• MIPS CPU written in Verilog
• LambdaVM - Programmable Virtual CPU Written as an Untyped Lambda Calculus Term.
• Hermes - Speculative mechanism that accelerates long-latency off-chip load requests by removing on-chip cache access latency from their critical path.
• Skylake: Intel’s Longest Serving Architecture (2022) (HN)
• X86 CPU topics overview for developers, oriented towards performance
• AMD Hypervisor written written in Rust
• Description of Apple's LEAP ISA
• Reverse Branch Target Buffer Poisoning (2022)
• Why is Rosetta 2 fast? (2022) (HN) (Reddit)
• A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon (2022)
• ARM1 Gate-level Simulation (HN)
• Knight’s Landing: Atom with AVX-512 (2022)
• TSMC: Semiconductors and Borders of Light (2022)