Processors

x86 ARM RISC-V

Optimize machine learning for Metal apps
- Half Precision Floating Point
A bit of Z80 history
- [z80]
The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade
Hot Chips 34 – Intel’s Meteor Lake Chiplets, Compared to AMD’s 2022
- Breakdown of Intel and AMD processor architectures with diagrams
Skymont: Intel’s E-Cores reach for the Sky 2025 Chester Lam
- hacker news comments
- Crazy detail
- Triple decoder is one unique effect. The fact that Intel managed to get them lined up for small loops to do 9x effective instruction issue is basically miraculous IMO. Very well done. Another unique effect is L2 shared between 4 cores. This means that thread communications across those 4 cores has much lower latencies.
@kenshirriff twitter
- The Intel 8086 processor was introduced in 1978, ancestor of the x86 architecture. The 8086 was the first microprocessor with prefetch, reading instructions from memory in advance for more speed. By reverse-engineering the chip under a microscope, I can explain how this works.
- The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations
The Intel 8088 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside
Booting modern Intel CPUs

Alternative/Emerging

Optical Transformers
- Using 'light' for processors - theoretical 100x energy efficiency