This is short review about creating a bare-metal microbenchmarking environment for the Apple M2 (specifically, for my new 13" MacBook Pro with the T8112).

This is the second part of my exploration into branch prediction and speculation in the Zen 2 microarchitecture, where we look at the behavior of unconditional direct branches and continue digging into details about the branch predictor.

This is the first part of my exploration into branch prediction and speculation in the Zen 2 microarchitecture, where I introduce a lot of context and present some tests with conditional branches.

The last time I wrote, I talked about some of my experiments with the Instruction-based Sampling (IBS) functionality on Zen 2 machines. This time, we're talking about exploring something somewhat more general.

A while ago, I built a new desktop machine with a Ryzen 9 3950X. I had never owned any AMD silicon before this, so I thought it might be kind of interesting to read the programmer's manual and learn a little bit about Zen 2.