It's interesting to see such a reverse engineering of this infamous bug straight from the gates layout.

Fascinating research about side-channel attacks. Learned a lot about them and website fingerprinting here. Also interesting the explanations of how the use of machine learning models can actually get in the way of proper understanding of the side-channel really used by an attack which can prevent developing actually useful counter-measures.

Data layout is essential for performance reasons. It is too often overlooked. If you want real speed you need to help the memory subsystem.

Nice list of common portability issues one can encounter at the machine architecture level. But don't be fooled, this doesn't have implications only for C and C++, those problems leak in higher level languages as well.

SIMD is hard to use, not all problems can apply to it. But when they can, the performance gain can be great.

Luckily this kind of very low level vulnerabilities are not too common and difficult to exploit. But when they get exploited all things break loose and you can't trust your hardware anymore.

Interesting article about what's coming for the branch predictor in the Zen 5 architecture from AMD.

A new type of attack targeting the CPU indirect branch predictor.

SIMD keeps providing interesting performance boosts for parsing work loads.

Very nice explanation and metaphors on how CPUs cache levels work.

Excellent work to improve Llama execution speed on CPU. It probably has all the tricks of the trade to accelerate this compute kernel.

Good exploration of the CPU architectures we have nowadays, and why the RISC vs CISC debate doesn't make sense anymore.

A good reminder that even though GPU tend to be faster, the added complexity and price might not be worth it in the end.

Will AMD really turn this around? Wait and see.

A good reminder that depending what happens in the kernel, the I/O time you were expecting might turn out to be purely CPU time.

I didn't read it since it's basically a whole book. Still from the outline it looks like a very good resource for beginners or to dog deeper on some lower level topics.

Interesting tale and exploration on how a change in includes impacted cache misses. This is sneaky (and solved with more recent compilers).

What's worse than a compiler bug? A processor one... very interesting deep dive in this particularly nasty one.

Can't say I learned much but that was a very neat refresher. It's very well done, so if you never dabbled in the basics of how the hardware or the kernel work I strongly recommend reading it.

Very thorough overview on how registers are used when you get closer to the hardware. Very good resource to use as reference.