Pipelines

Lab 1: CPU Internals This is a hands-on report for the lab in /home/sanketh/cpu-lab on your Linux x86 laptop. It ties each experiment back to the ideas in content/posts/performance-engineering/2026-10-04-cpu-microarchitecture.markdown. Important note about this laptop: the CPU is an Intel Core i5-8250U (15 W mobile part, base 1.6 GHz, max 3.4 GHz). Under sustained load it thermally throttles, so absolute nanoseconds vary between runs. The conclusions come from ratios and TMA buckets, not from chasing the exact ns. ...

Performance Engineering: CPU Microarchitecture for the Practitioner This note explains what a modern CPU actually does while your program runs, and how to read that behavior through hardware performance counters. The goal is not to memorize every unit in a specific core design, but to build a mental model that makes perf output meaningful. If the previous note asked “where does the time go,” this note answers “what is the CPU doing with the cycles it consumes.” ...