Chips and Cheese

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite uses a hybrid core setup, breaking away from the all-big-core strategy that the company previously used with in-house core designs. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E96100 contains 18 cores, divided into 6 “performance” cores and 12 “prime” cores. Qualcomm’s “performance” cores fill the same role as little cores or efficiency cores on other chi...

Nvidia’s Vera server chip aims for high per-core performance. Its Olympus cores have massive out-of-order structures and use high per-clock throughput to meet that goal within a high core count server chip. Core design however is only one part of the equation. Off-core memory access can heavily impact core performance, and higher core counts complicate interconnect design. Th...