clamtech.org?dest=intel_u... - Sharing some thoughts on Intel's possible unified core project. Basically, I think the easiest route is a Zen 4c/5c style shrink of their P-Core. But of course, Intel has more options than that

Sharing another piece I wrote last year, comparing hardware AV1 encoding on Intel's Arc B580 and AMD's Hawk Point, at clamtech.org?dest=av1hwenc Should be a good test of image handling on the site, with sliders for quality comparisons

Sharing a piece I wrote a while ago on Zen 1. I mostly did this to test my site design, with plenty of pagination, tables, and captioned images. It's a pretty complete article by itself though, and I hope yall find it a fun read! clamtech.org?dest=zen1

Intel's Arrow Lake is impressively efficient when running throughput-bound stuff on 16 underclocked E-Cores. I'm running all Geekbench 6 workloads in parallel through Intel SDE (so emulated, to get exact instruction counts), and this chip is getting over 3.7G instructions/watt.

clamtech.org?dest=gpuwrite Here's a look at GPU cache/memory write bandwidth across a variety of hardware

Time for a little site with some multi-page support! I plan to write random thoughts on hardware there. To start, here's some commentary on drilling down GPU cache latency using very funny OpenCL kernels: clamtech.org?dest=gpudire...

So far I used a simple a=a[a] pattern to test GPU memory latency, but that indexed addressing penalty always bothered me. I finally got around to making the compiler spit out a chain of dependent loads and nothing else. Good start on AMD. I save ~4 or ~12 ns for scalar and vector accesses

Intel's desktop Arrow Lake always keeps the SNCU (die to die interface and some other parts of the uncore) at 2.6 GHz. On Meteor Lake, it goes up to 2.4 GHz but varies a lot probably to save power.

Intel's newer Emerald Rapids improves L3 latency compared to Sapphire Rapids, at least when one core is able to allocate a similar amount of L3 capacity. It's still high at ~105 core cycles, but better than ~125 cycles from the last generation.

Arm never documented PMU events for their op cache. From brute force searching, there's a pair of possibly related events. Event 0x177 may be op cache hits, and 0x178 may be op cache misses. Both events appear to count instructions (not micro-ops or cachelines)

AMD had a separate Shader Array subdivision within Shader Engines even in the original GCN architecture. Interesting that it never mattered until RDNA added a L1 cache to the Shader Arrays and had multiple SAs per SE

Output from DispatchRays calls in CP2077's path tracing mode, with exposure adjusted manually and no denoising done There's just not enough computing power available to get a good sample count while maintaining real-time performance. It's like setting ISO 102400 on a DSLR

Messing around with microbenchmarking Arc B580 12.2 TB/s of L1 bandwidth, or ~214 bytes per Xe Core cycle Theoretical is probably 256B/cycle. But close enough for now

Cinebench 2024 on the Ryzen 7 4800H (Zen 2) Stock: 600 pts Op cache disabled: 525 pts

In games with higher VRAM usage (DCS), GPU-Z incorrectly shows 16.8 GB of dedicated memory used (out of 12 GB total lol). Task manager correctly shows shared memory allocated

Frame drop in Baldur's Gate 3, as captured by GPUView. The game has to move ~35 MB to the GPU, which means reserving space to hold the data, getting the data contiguous in physical memory, and of course doing the transfer. Really fast, takes just 12.6 ms, but is enough to miss a 60Hz vsync interval

Zero-copy should be more natural on an iGPU versus a discrete one, but not all iGPUs can do zero-copy. Here I'm testing OpenCL Shared Virtual Memory with a 256 MB buffer and only modifying one 32-bit value in it. Anything in the millisecond range implies the driver had to copy the entire buffer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwlK... Discussing turning off Zen 4's op cache and its performance consequences, in video format :)

Skymont perfmon events (specifically unit masks for evt 0xD1, retired mem loads by source) appear to act differently on Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Expected, given their different cache setups. But I wish Intel would hurry up and get LNL/ARL documentation written up :/

Youtube AV1 decoding can be heavy on old CPUs, even at 1080P. IPC though is surprisingly good for AMD's very outdated 12h architecture.

In Zen 5's Processor Programming Reference, the L3 performance event select registers now take core IDs from 0-15. That would let the register handle 16 core CCX-es. Of course this doesn't mean a 16 core CCX will show up, but it's interesting that AMD's laying the groundwork for it.

Zen 4 has a funny errata where an on-die 1.8V voltage regulator might be configured incorrectly, which then kills the CPU by feeding something too much voltage.

Zen 4 had a 144 entry loop buffer. However, it's disabled in the latest BIOS for my ASRock B650 PG Lightning. Maybe AMD found a bug that no one else ran into (or realized they were hitting). Likely doesn't affect performance, as the op cache has more than enough bandwidth to feed downstream stages.

Memory latency under varying bandwidth loads on three different CPUs. The old Broadwell HEDT chip does well at providing consistent performance and minimizing noisy neighbor effects