Curious about the internal designs of GPUs, CPUs, and game consoles? Tired of lame articles full of uninformed speculation and fanboy rants? Then check out the archives of the “Hot Chips” conference, an annual conference where computer chip designers get together to brag about their latest chips. The conference presentation slides are all online, and they’re full of good technical information on GPUs, CPUs. and even game consoles. Of course, presenters often gloss over any technical problems with their chips, so you won’t get the full picture. But these presentations offer a detailed technical look inside otherwise secret system architectures.
(For what it’s worth the web site is poorly organized, and many links are broken – you sometimes have to edit the URLs slightly to find the correct links.)
Some highlights:
Reality Co-Processor, Ken Hayes (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) - All about the Nintendo 64.
Gekko: A PowerPC compatible processor supporting high- performance 3D Graphics - Gamecube CPU