Summary of Processor Architecture

Summary of what we’ve learned

Below is a quick summary of what we’ve learned in this sections and definitions of some terms that may not have been clear.

Real systems

Finally, let’s look at some real processors. This video includes a description of the ARM A55 and AMD Zen 2, two recent realistic architectures. The ARM A55 is a high-performance in-order design that is in most of your smart phones. Your phones often have a “bigLITTLE” design where there is both smaller, lower performance, in-order cores like the A55 and higher performance, larger, out-of-order cores like the Arm A77.

The AMD Zen 2 is AMD’s core architecture that you can find in most AMD Ryzen desktop processors, Epyc server processors, and the PS5 and XBOX Series X.

Finally, this video discusses the latest Intel microarchitecture Sunny Cove. Intel has lots of slightly different architectures for each of their consumer parts (e.g., i3, i5, i7, i9, Xeons, and other brands). To be honest, I’m not sure exactly where the Sunny Cove microarchitecture fits in, but it’s one of Intel’s more recent high-performance designs.

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